Why DOGE Should Promote Integrity Scoring

The role of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is to estimate the fiscal effects of government programs. For most programs, CBO’s estimates include behavioral responses to policy changes, such as shifts in labor supply or consumer spending. In a recent post, I discussed how such methods fail to incorporate dynamic scoring, meaning that proposed laws are assumed not to affect macroeconomic aggregates like GDP. Since many laws are precisely intended to affect GDP, the failure to incorporate dynamic scoring is problematic.

A second and perhaps more consequential failure in the scoring process is that the CBO typically does not capture the economic impact of programs designed to reduce waste, fraud, and abuse in government spending. This is not their fault; CBO is constrained by longstanding scorekeeping guidelines. Under current rules, the agency can only account for the upfront costs of these activities, not the savings they generate. For instance, if a program costs $100 million to administer but reduces waste by $150 million, the score reflects only the $100 million expenditure, creating a misleading picture of the program’s true fiscal impact.

This issue is compounded by the rising scale of waste and fraud in federal programs. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), improper payments have cost taxpayers $2.6 trillion over the past 20 years, with a sharp surge during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the high return on investment (ROI) of program integrity initiatives, current scoring practices create a bias against funding these activities.

In work for the Mercatus Center, Keith Hall highlights that the systematic failure to budget efficient government spending properly means that Congress is disincentivized from pursuing waste reduction and offers a solution: integrity scoring. By fully accounting for the ROI from anti-waste efforts, this approach provides a more accurate and comprehensive picture of the fiscal impact of program integrity initiatives. 

DOGE and integrity scoring

Integrity scoring would play a key role in evaluating the effectiveness of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—an advisory commission, not a cabinet-level department, promoted by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy—which aims to reduce waste through increasing the efficiency of government spending. By construction, any funding of DOGE under current scoring practices would have a negative return because CBO would score it as not affecting the efficiency of other types of spending. (Full disclosure: Vivek Ramaswamy was a board member of FREOPP from 2020-2024.)

DOGE should push for Congress to change scoring guidelines to account for integrity for three key reasons:

1. Integrity scoring offers a framework to measure the fiscal impact of efforts to reduce fraud and waste. Together with dynamic scoring, integrity scoring makes it easier to figure out whether various experiments are worth funding. By the same token, it may be more costly to evaluate and cut a particular program than the return generated from getting rid of it. The best way to know is through integrity scoring.
2. DOGE is a controversial project and will face a great deal of political and bureaucratic resistance. A transparent framework using integrity scoring would go a long way to justify the endeavor.
3. DOGE is set to conclude its work in July 2026 and needs to ensure that its efforts to reduce waste are baked into policy for a long time. By pushing for the adoption of integrity scoring, DOGE could ensure that the bias against funding programs to reduce fraud no longer exists.

DOGE should push for two practical steps that CBO and Congress should take to change existing scorekeeping guidelines:

1. Eliminate the “Fingerprint Rule” (Guideline 3): This rule prevents CBO from fully scoring changes in discretionary funding for mandatory programs, creating a “hole” in the official estimates for program integrity activities.
2. Revise the Asymmetric Rule for Administrative Costs (Guideline 14): This rule blocks the inclusion of savings from program management activities, even when those savings significantly outweigh the costs.

These changes would align the treatment of program integrity spending with other types of budgetary investments, ensuring that Congress receives a complete picture of the fiscal impact of anti-waste initiatives.

Integrity scoring is particularly important for poorer Americans 

Policymakers design welfare programs to help those genuinely in need, but waste, fraud, and abuse undermine the efficiency of these programs and erode public trust in them, including negative stereotypes about beneficiaries. For example, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has faced issues with trafficking, wherein recipients exchange benefits for cash, often at a fraction of their value. Similarly, unemployment insurance programs saw a surge in fraudulent claims during the COVID-19 pandemic, including identity theft and false claims for benefits.

During the pandemic, I worked as a management consultant. Unemployment offices hired our firm to staff agencies, take calls from welfare recipients, and overhaul their systems because the new welfare programs overwhelmed their capabilities. For two months in mid-2020, I answered calls for the State of Michigan and helped implement programs like Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, which gave assistance to workers who would not otherwise qualify for benefits. Setting aside the staggering cost of hiring six-figure consultants to answer the phone, this experience was a window into the fraud that occurs on the benefits side of welfare.

At first, everyone in my unit was eager to help people who called in for benefits. But as time went by, cynicism took hold of some colleagues as they fielded numerous and flagrant calls from recipients attempting to game the system. Such abuse can crowd out those who really need help in two ways. First, it takes real resources away from those who generally deserve them. Second, it breeds skepticism of anyone trying to get benefits because distinguishing between who deserves it and who does not becomes more complicated.

Such instances of fraud feed into negative stereotypes about welfare recipients, perpetuating the myth that government assistance is widely abused by those it is designed to help. These narratives harm public perception of poor Americans and can erode political support for vital programs that help them. Through integrity scoring, we can encourage the improvement of current programs and the creation of new ones that gradually eliminate these issues over time.

Toward a more accountable budget process

Integrity scoring isn’t just about improving technical accuracy; it’s about enabling better policymaking. By providing a full accounting of the fiscal benefits of program integrity efforts, this approach could empower Congress to make more informed decisions about where to allocate resources.

At a time when waste, fraud, and abuse are costing taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars annually, the need for integrity scoring has never been greater. DOGE, with its bold mission to improve government efficiency, has a unique opportunity to champion this approach. By prioritizing integrity scoring, DOGE can help ensure that federal spending delivers the greatest possible value to the American people; and set a new standard for accountability in government.