

CBO Director Doug Elmendorf (Alex Wong/GETTY Images)

Even before Republicans won full control of Congress, there was a lot of scary talk from liberals about the damage Republicans might do to that nonpartisan mediator, the Congressional Budget Office. The director's job will be open in January, and speculation has been rampant about which far-right economist the GOP chairmen of the House and Senate Budget committees might seek to install to do their nefarious bidding.

Over the past few days, some heavy-hitters in conservative circles have made their choice clear: Republicans should keep Doug Elmendorf, the current CBO director. A guy appointed by Democrats.

Why? Because Elmendorf has been scrupulously impartial, they argue, and unafraid to cut the knees out from under some illegitimate liberal ideas. A Democratic appointee willing to trash stupid Democratic policies, they argue, is a potent weapon that Republicans should think twice about casting aside.

The cavalcade of conservative accolades for Elmendorf kicked off over the weekend with a blog post from Greg Mankiw, the chairman of the Harvard economics department and a former adviser to both president George W. Bush and GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney. More followed, from Alan Viard, a Bush White House economist now at the American Enterprise Institute; author Charles Murray via Twitter; AEI scholar Michael R. Strain, writing in the National Review Online; and Keith Hennessey, a senior Bush economic adviser who now lectures at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

While Mankiw and Viard stressed Elmendorf's integrity and impartiality (Mankiw called him a "superb economist"), Hennessey made the most pointed political argument for keeping Elmendorf in a Wednesday blog post:

Dr. Elmendorf is the best pick for CBO because (a) he is unbiased and intellectually honest; (b) his background insulates his rulings and the Congressional Republicans who choose to reappoint him from accusations of bias; and, most importantly, (c) this combination greatly disadvantages the progressive Left who both dominate current economic debate within the Democratic party and who cannot refrain from intellectual overreach....

Over the past few years an Elmendorf-led CBO has weakened a few key support pillars of the Left’s big government intellectual edifice, not because Elmendorf leans right but because the Left is dominant and nuts and their most outrageous arguments just beg to be debunked by a neutral referee.

Hennessey gave several examples of CBO analyses under Elmendorf that have served to undermine pernicious lefty ideas. When "Team Obama" insisted that an increase in the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour would "benefit millions and harm no one," Hennessey wrote, "CBO destroyed this claim, pointing out that the President’s favored policy would reduce the labor supply by about half a million workers." In turn:

"The press repeatedly wrote that 'the nonpartisan CBO' said the President’s minimum wage increase would reduce the labor supply by half a million workers.' We won those debates in part thanks to an assist from a CBO that was and was described as unbiased and nonpartisan."

Other examples: CBO concluded that the Affordable Care Act would cause people to work fewer hours, an assertion that "would have been dismissed or caveated by many (most?) of the press" if CBO had been under the control of "Congressional Republicans and their hand-picked conservative CBO Director," as Hennessey put it. "The identical conclusions from a director chosen by Republicans would have had far less impact on the public debate."

And Hennessey offered more evidence of Elmendorf's sensible thinking:

Under Elmendorf, CBO said that increasing marginal tax rates dampens economic growth because it reduces incentives to work, save, and invest. Elmendorf’s CBO said that transfer payments reduce work incentives and shrink the labor force. In contrast to President Obama and Dr. Krugman, Elmendorf’s CBO warned that high and rising debt levels will lower future income, increase pressure for higher taxes or less defense spending, and increase the risk of a fiscal crisis at some uncertain future date. In contrast to the Piketty Fan Club, CBO’s distributional analysis showed that the burden of financing government is even more distributed toward the high end than is income, and they integrated into their analysis the effects of both taxes and transfer payments.

These are powerful truths, he wrote, that could help advance Republican economic policies if only lawmakers would "actually read what CBO writes" and learn to use Elmendorf's frequent appearances in Hill hearings to "highlight the ways in which left-wing dogma contradicts straight-up-the-middle economic analysis."

Initial indications are Republicans may not heed this advice. Incoming House Budget Committee chairman Tom Price (R-Ga.) gets to make the call on the CBO director this year, with advice from the Senate Budget Committee chairman. Price has declined to comment. In a recent interview, one of two Republicans up for the Senate budget post, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), suggested that folks on his side of the Capitol, anyway, may be inclined to put their own stamp on the agency.

Elmendorf was chosen six years ago by then House Budget Committee chairman John Spratt (D-S.C.) and reappointed four years ago by then Senate Budget Committee chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.). If nothing else, he can take solace in the fact that everybody seems to love the job he's done during enormously trying times. Even before conservatives began weighing in, former White House budget chief Peter Orszag (himself a former CBO director) urged Republicans not to appoint a "party hack" to the CBO director's chair -- and to keep Elmendorf on the job.