Budget Issues

As required by the Budget Enforcement Act of 1990, this compliance report covers reports issued by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) during the session of Congress ending December 1, 1994. In GAO's opinion, the OMB and CBO reports substantially complied with the act. Although these issues do not, in GAO's judgment, represent compliance issues, GAO does discuss some implementation matters involving differences in cost estimates in appropriation acts and the dissimilar budget treatment for the Federal Crop Insurance Reform Act. OMB and CBO estimates for outlays from appropriations acts varied because they used (1) different approaches to scoring emergency and contingent emergency appropriations and (2) different assumptions about the timing of outlays. The differences in cost estimates were due primarily to different methodological and technical assumptions by OMB and CBO about the programs involved. OMB and CBO cost estimates were similar for the newly created Violent Crime Reduction Trust Fund. GAO describes the different approaches OMB and CBO used to estimate the costs of the Federal Crop Insurance Reform Act because it was the only pay-as-you-go legislation with significant outlay variance.

GAO found that: (1) the OMB and CBO reports substantially complied with the Budget Enforcement Act of 1990; (2) OMB and CB0 outlay estimates for general purpose appropriations varied because of different approaches to scoring emergency and contingent emergency appropriations and different assumptions about the timing of outlays; (3) the differences in cost estimates were due primarily to different methodological and technical assumptions by OMB and CBO about the programs involved; (4) OMB and CB0 cost estimates were similar for the newly created Violent Crime Reduction Trust Fund; and (5) OMB and CB0 used different approaches to estimate the costs of the Federal Crop Insurance Reform Act of 1994 because it was the only pay-as-you-go legislation with a significant outlay variance.