Home Scorekeeping

A Note About Scorekeeping

TPC_Logo

The Peter G. Peterson Foundation’s Solutions Initiative 2024 enlisted seven independent policy organizations to develop comprehensive plans that met the following criteria:

  • Proposed solutions should be sufficiently detailed to allow them to be scored by independent analysts against the February 2024 baseline from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) — extended through FY 2054 using CBO’s Long-Term Outlook (published in March 2024).
  • Each finished budget plan should represent a comprehensive package of specific policy proposals to address the projected long-term fiscal gap. The Foundation did not stipulate a required goal or target for these plans.
  • Each plan should be accompanied by a detailed spreadsheet that provides preliminary estimates of its budgetary effects.

To enable fair and objective comparisons of the plans, the Foundation engaged independent scorekeepers to carry out estimates or review analyses for each plan. The scorekeeping effort for spending proposals was conducted by Barry Anderson, former Acting Director at CBO and senior career civil servant at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, estimated the plans’ revenue proposals and the macroeconomic effects of the budget plans.

The scorekeeping team, using common baseline assumptions, carefully reviewed each of the spending and revenue proposals submitted by the seven organizations. In particular, the scorekeeping team reviewed:

  • the sources cited by the organizations to support their estimates;
  • estimates produced by existing models developed to score similar proposals;
  • comparisons with estimates of similar proposals made by other organizations; and,
  • comparisons with similar proposals made by one or more of the other organizations that developed plans as part of Solutions Initiative 2024.

Many of the organizations cited scoring of similar proposals produced by CBO, OMB, the Joint Committee on Taxation, and other agencies that have extensive experience in scoring proposals, which greatly facilitated the scoring of the proposals.

For the past several months, the scorekeeping team has had extensive discussions with each of the organizations. Some of the organizations’ original proposals were modified as a result of those discussions. The scorekeeping team recognized that estimating the budgetary impact of proposals over a 30-year period is inherently difficult, especially since many of the proposals were innovative and therefore not easily compared to previous policies. Nevertheless, despite those difficulties, the scorekeepers sought to make their estimates as accurate and consistent with objective scorekeeping principles as possible. As a result of such efforts, the scorekeeping team is satisfied that the organizations’ plans can be fairly and objectively compared with each other.