By taking control of both houses of Congress next year, Republicans will have total control over the basic decisions about how the Congressional Budget Office, a key “scorer” of legislation, is run. NR contributor and Manhattan Institute fellow Avik Roy has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today laying out what the GOP should do with it. After MIT professor Jonathan Gruber made it a little too obvious how advocates of the ACA had managed to fudge congressional budget scores of the law, he notes, change has to come.

Avik has two specific ideas — push the CBO toward doing more analysis of how tax cuts can stimulate the economy’s overall growth (an example of what’s known as “dynamic scoring”) and get them to finish work on modeling how markets can reduce costs, especially in health insurance — and one big one, making the office’s work more open and transparent.

Yuval Levin and others have been pushing for the last idea, as well, pointing out that it could make the CBO both more respected and more encouraging to policy innovation. (It takes a decent amount of effort to get a CBO score to legitimize legislation, and of course it isn’t available to non-legislators.)

The question of dynamic scoring is a little more controversial — it’s certainly possible to go too far in assuming that tax cuts will create higher overall economic growth and therefore higher tax payments. But the Journal’s editorial board thinks that it’s impossible to go far enough in undoing what they see as the CBO’s unfair, liberal assumptions. They want to take the institution, and a similar body, the Joint Committee on Taxation, out back and, you know:

One reason Republicans didn’t achieve more reform after taking Congress in 1994, and again after 2002, is that they didn’t either repeal or replace these institutions created to serve Democrats. The wisest course is to abolish CBO and Joint Tax and allow open debate about the tax and spending implications of policy changes. Let the politicians with the authority to make these decisions be accountable for the results.

As Megan McArdle argues, it’s hard to see how this makes strategic sense for conservatives: The CBO’s middle-of-the-academic-road projections do hamstring Republicans’ ability to pass permanent tax cuts (it’s a little complicated exactly why), but they act just as often, and likely more often, as a break on liberal spending ambitions. She notes the insane projections House Democrats made about Medicare in the 1960s, which were off by about a factor of ten come 1990. Peter Suderman has more on the historical case for the usefulness of the CBO, arguing it’s really as much a check on the executive branch as anything else.

It also seems like the Journal’s editorial understates the space for reform: They write, for instance, that “thanks to the Federal Credit Reform Act of 1990, CBO must use accounting methods that even the CBO admits are bogus when evaluating federal student loans, the Export-Import Bank, and other Washington subsidy programs.” But it’s thanks to the FCRA that the CBO uses accrual counting to measure loan programs, rather than the default, much more unsuitable cash accounting they’d used previously. The office should probably go further and use fair-value accounting (for more on this shift, see Jason Delisle and NR contributor Jason Richwine here), but the CBO has gotten better on loan accounting.

As with dynamic scoring, there are ways fair-value accounting could come back to bite Republicans: It would account for more of the costs of federal loan subsidies, but would make privatizing Social Security look more expensive, too. So whether it or dynamic scoring is a good idea per se, it still seems better to have a consistent, transparent standard for legislation, rather than only the battle of partisan projections you’d get without a CBO, each side switching its standards based on what works for them in a given moment.

The Journal concedes that ending the JCT and the CBO is an unlikely outcome, so they suggest a couple of possible directors who could drag it in a much more conservative (or supply-side, rather) direction: Steve Entin of the Tax Foundation or David Malpass, a former Treasury official and WSJ contributor. Avik suggests Steven Parente, a professor at the University of Minnesota who has helped model a number of market-driven health-care proposals.