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If you are a senator or a member of Congress and you have some great idea about a new piece of legislation, at some point someone will have to say, okay, this is how much your amazing piece of legislation would cost.
Yeah.
And back in the day, it used to be that the White House gave you that cost estimate.
But in the 1970s, there were some members of Congress who started to say, uh, how do we know we can trust the White House office of Management and Budget?
This was when Richard Nixon was in the White House.
This is pre Watergate, but already trust was not exactly at an all time high between the legislative and executive branches.
Congress wanted its own nonpartisan agency independent of the White House to tell them how much proposed legislation would cost.
And since they were Congress, they could just pass a law to create that.
And so in the summer of 1974, they did.
They created the Congressional Budget Office, the CBO.
Today, nearly every bill that passes a full committee.
So any bill that has a chance of getting voted on has to get priced by the CBO.
Congress generally does not vote on a bill until the CBO says this is how much it would cost.