[FlameOn]

Congressional Republicans move to dismantle the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office likely a move to be able to force crappy health care through. Screw facts and actually knowing about how much things will cost.

Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, said Monday that members would deploy an obscure rule that allows a House member to seek changes in an agency by offering an amendment during the budget process.

Called the Holman rule, it dates to the decade after the Civil War, hasn’t been used since President Ronald Reagan’s first term, and was revived by House Republicans when the new Congress convened in January.

Federal News Radio reported that the entire Budget Analysis Division of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, comprising 89 employees and about $15 million in salaries, would be “abolished” under the amendment offered by Meadows and three other Republicans—Reps. Morgan Griffith of Virginia, Jim Jordan of Ohio, and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania.

Meadows and the other three House members attached the amendment cutting the CBO to a so-called “minibus” of spending bills for fiscal year 2018 that includes defense, military construction, veterans affairs, energy, and water, according to Federal News Radio.

The Holman rule “gives us the tool to go in and cut the funding without cutting an entire agency,” Meadows said in an appearance at the National Press Club.

Cutting personnel at the Congressional Budget Office who “score” the cost and other effects of legislation such as the main House and Senate health care bills is where the caucus decided to begin, he said.

The Freedom Caucus chairman said that independent CBO process could be replaced by aggregate scores of budgetary impact from think tanks, and he named American Enterprise Institute, Brookings Institution, The Heritage Foundation, and Urban Institute.

http://www.newsweek.com/house-conser...-office-642542