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

ABSTRACT: By design, official budget estimates for legislative proposals generally exclude the proposals' likely effects on labor, capital, productivity, and output, as well as any feedback from such effects to the federal budget. Policymakers would benefit from knowing the expected sizes of those effects, and advances in research and in the estimating agencies' tools and experience have made such analysis more feasible. If Congress requested that those effects be included more often in official budget estimates—so-called dynamic scoring of legislation—the advantages and disadvantages would vary across policy areas. For some areas, the estimated budgetary impact of the currently excluded effects would be significantly different from the impact of the included effects. But dynamic scoring would be substantially more time-consuming than conventional scoring, and in some areas, the research base is insufficient for credible estimation.