In sports, if you don't like the referee's calls, about all you can do is scream and shout.

In government, you can try to fire him.

That's the way critics describe recent unsuccessful moves by 11th District U.S. Rep. Mark Meadows, R-Buncombe, and other very conservative House members to cut funding for the Congressional Budget Office by half.

The government agency, whose staffers are appointed by Congress and tasked with being nonpartisan, examines proposed legislation and estimates its impact, financial and otherwise. It has received a lot of attention in recent months for its projections that millions of Americans would no longer have health insurance under various Republican proposals to rewrite the Affordable Care Act.

The CBO got its start during the presidency of Richard Nixon as a counterbalance to the Office of Management and Budget, which is part of the executive branch of government. Congress wanted an independent agency to give it information not colored by what the president supported or opposed.

While most of the political world was watching the drama over what the Senate would do to the ACA, the House rejected two amendments to cut CBO funding that supporters tried to attach to a defense spending bill July 26. A slight majority of House Republicans voted against the cuts, joined by all the Democrats, making for lopsided losses for Meadows and his allies.

Meadows had suggested projections by two conservative-leaning think tanks, the Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute, and two more progressive groups, the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, be aggregated into composite "scores" for proposed legislation in place of CBO estimates.

He and others said CBO projections of the number of people who would get insurance through the ACA and of how much farm bills would cost have been off by wide margins.

"They are the one group that makes a weatherman's 10-day forecast look accurate," Meadows said during floor debate. "They consistently miss it all the time."

U.S. Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pennsylvania, said the CBO "simply must be held accountable for its consistent failure to accurately or even reasonably predict budget and economic impacts of legislation."

Supporters said CBO projections are not perfect, but predictions tied to the performance of the national economy or consumer behavior rarely are. They said private think tanks do not do the work on the wide variety of proposed legislation that the CBO does, and since those groups also make policy proposals, there would be a temptation to shape their scores to advance their positions.

Some called the moves revenge for the political damage CBO projections did to Republican efforts to change the law commonly called Obamacare.

"I understand that for Republicans and the Trump administration, it is an inconvenient truth that 23 million Americans would lose coverage under their plan, but just because you are losing the game doesn't mean you can fire the refs," U.S. Rep. Don Beyer, D-Virginia, told the House. "Partisan talking points cannot replace unbiased analysis."

The Republican chairs of the House Budget and Ways and Means committees opposed the amendments, as did ranking Democratic members of the committees.

But, there will be more talk about the CBO's performance. Budget Committee chairwoman U.S. Rep. Diane Black, R-Tennessee, said she plans hearings in the fall on ways to improve the CBO's accuracy.

She called it "an important organization that provides vital information that Congress does need to make the best decisions."

"We all realize that CBO has room for improvement," she said, but cutting its budget "is not the best way to achieve that."