Dynamic Scoring: A Progress Report on Why, When, and How

By design, official budget estimates for legislative proposals generally exclude the proposals’ likely effects on levels of labor, capital, productivity, and other economic outcomes, as well as any feedback effects from changes in those outcomes to the federal budget. Policymakers would benefit from knowing the expected sizes of those economic effects, and advances in research and in the estimating agencies’ tools and experience have made providing estimates of those effects more feasible. If Congress requested that those effects be included more often in budget estimates—so-called “dynamic scoring” of legislation—the advantages and disadvantages of doing so would vary across policy areas. For some areas, the budgetary impacts of the currently excluded effects have been estimated to be significantly different from the impacts of the included effects. But producing dynamic estimates would be substantially more time-consuming than producing conventional estimates, and in some areas, the research base needed to inform modeling of the relevant economic effects is insufficient for credible estimation.