Used

“Congress used CBO to get the answer they wanted. I get that. I ran the CBO. They used me too.” - Hit & Run : Reason Magazine: "Last March, as House Democrats were preparing for their final votes on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Douglas Holtz-Eakin published an op-ed in The New York Times arguing that, despite Congressional Budget Office scores indicating otherwise, the president’s health care overhaul would in fact increase the nation’s budget deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars over the long term. Since then, he’s become one of the most prominent critics of the claim that the law will result in a smaller deficit, expanding his critique in co-written pieces for Health Affairs and, most recently, The Wall Street Journal.

Holtz-Eakin, who currently heads the American Action Forum, isn’t just any critic: From 2003 to 2005, he ran the Congressional Budget Office himself. His time at the CBO gave him great respect for the office's capabilities and the quality of its work. It also gave him firsthand knowledge of the scoring process, its inherent limitations, and the ways that determined members of Congress can use the process to their political advantage."