This article is focussed on anti-trust regulation, but the problems it addresses are much broader. Every spending and tax law, for example, is scored by the Co

This article is focussed on anti-trust regulation, but the problems it addresses are much broader. Every spending and tax law, for example, is scored by the Congressional Budget Office/Joint Committee on Taxation to determine the budgetary impact. Economists are hired to lobby these organizations about the "right" way to score policy, and then the organizations might or might not adjust their methodologies. Sometimes Congress can place pressure on the scoring organizations, too. This would all be fine, except that neither the economic methodologies nor the data are publicly available. Sure, the big picture methodology is disclosed, but not the key assumptions. If the economic methodologies were disclosed in full, I'd be all for outsiders suggesting ways to improve the methods. Then a scientific discussion could be carried out in public, and I think it would be obvious to anyone observing the process that the JCT or CBO economists are trying to do the best job that they can. One step towards disclosing methods is through documentation, but given the importance of detail in the types of analyses that JCT and CBO do, supplemental documentation is unlikely to be sufficient. Instead, the organizations need to make their analytical code available. In other words, CBO and JCT should make their code available to the public and take outside suggestions for improvements. They should be open source! Granted the data won't always be available to the public given that CBO and JCT rely on administrative data that is highly private, but they can at least produce dummy datasets and detailed summary statistics. All of this same reasoning applies to the anti-trust situation. They ought to open source their analyses as well. [Disclaimer, I'm a contributor to a few open source models for public policy analysis.]