Politics

‘Nonpartisan’ agency withdraws pro-liberal tax policy report in wake of TheDC’s investigation into author’s Democrat donations

Matthew Boyle Investigative Reporter
Font Size:

The Congressional Research Service (CRS) has withdrawn a recent report touting liberal tax policy ideas as “nonpartisan” in the wake an investigation by The Daily Caller into its author’s Democratic Party donations.

The report concluded that tax cuts for upper-income earners in America don’t spur economic growth. The report’s author is a frequent donor to the Democratic Party and President Barack Obama.

Thomas Hungerford authored “Taxes and the Economy: An Economic Analysis of the Top Tax Rates Since 1945″ for CRS. The report, published Sept. 14, supported the Obama’s administration’s tax policy.

Hungerford’s LinkedIn profile shows he has worked at CRS since 2005. In 2008, political donation records published by the Center for Responsive Politics show Hungerford donated $3,500 to Obama’s campaign. He gave the president another $500 in August 2012.

Since 2009, Hungerford has also donated $2,450 to Democratic Party organizations such as the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

In October 2000, when he worked as an economist for the Social Security Administration, Hungerford donated $500 to Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Al Gore.

When TheDC first reported Hungerford’s record of political donations on Sept. 25, the supposedly nonpartisan fact arbiter CRS stood by the pro-liberal report. Spokeswoman Janine D’Addario touted the agency’s claims of apolitical research then said the report went through a lengthy review process.

“He [Hungerford] does the analysis, and then the analysis is reviewed by multiple levels before the document is issued,” D’Addario said at the time.

“The work that CRS does for Congress is objective and nonpartisan,” D’Addario added. “To help insure that, all of the work that comes out of the organization goes through peer-review, section-review, division-review and then departmental-review. There is a multilayer review process to help ensure objectivity and nonpartisanship. This paper followed that process.”

She said the people who review Hungerford’s work “would be peer review, his immediate supervisor, his immediate supervisor’s supervisor — the manager of the division he’s in — and then CRS has a departmental review panel that reads through every piece that goes out.”

When asked who the reviewers were, D’Addario wouldn’t agree to publicly release a list of everyone involved in preparing and reviewing the report. “That could be compiled, but it’s not something I would share,” D’Addario said.

After TheDC’s report, though, congressional Republicans and conservative groups pushed for answers on how Hungerford’s conclusions could be passed off as fact so easily. A spokeswoman for Senate Finance Committee ranking GOP member Sen. Orrin Hatch told reporters last week that GOP staff “shared a litany of concerns with CRS over the methodology, the analysis and the conclusions.”

“After we shared our concerns over the methodology of this report, CRS took it down, on its own volition,” Hatch spokeswoman Antonia Ferrier said in an emailed statement.

Tax Foundation senior fellow Stephen Entin said, too, that the report’s “methods were so seriously flawed that the study could not possibly pick up any relationship between taxes and growth, making its results, or lack of them, meaningless.”

While CRS no longer stands by the report, Hungerford himself still does. He joins some in the media who believe CRS’s removal of the report is some kind of suppression or censorship.

Hungerford blames Republicans on Capitol Hill for the CRS decision to take down the report, claiming they pressured CRS into it. “Basically, the decision to take it down, I think The New York Times article basically got it right, that it was pressure from the Senate minority to take it down,” Hungerford told the liberal Huffington Post, referencing a New York Times article that bashed the GOP for the removal of the report.

“The pressure applied to the research service comes amid a broader Republican effort to raise questions about research and statistics that were once trusted as nonpartisan and apolitical,” the Times wrote.

Hungerford added that “CRS reports go through many layers of review before they’re issued and as far as the tone and the conclusions go, people who specifically look at the writing and the tone said it was okay. So it’s not going to be that and as I can tell you outright, I stand by the report and the analysis in the report.”

Though some in the media and the report’s author blame Republicans for the report’s retraction, Hatch’s spokeswoman brushes those accusations off as conspiracy theories.

“If Republicans were interested in pressuring the CRS for political reasons, this surely wouldn’t be the first piece we chose to single out,” Ferrier said. “This piece, however, took such liberties with economic analysis and CRS’s independent reputation, that a constructive discussion was necessary given its deep, irreparable flaws.”

Follow Matthew on Twitter

PREMIUM ARTICLE: Subscribe To Keep Reading

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign Up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
BENEFITS READERS PASS PATRIOTS FOUNDERS
Daily and Breaking Newsletters
Daily Caller Shows
Ad Free Experience
Exclusive Articles
Custom Newsletters
Editor Daily Rundown
Behind The Scenes Coverage
Award Winning Documentaries
Patriot War Room
Patriot Live Chat
Exclusive Events
Gold Membership Card
Tucker Mug

What does Founders Club include?

Tucker Mug and Membership Card
Founders

Readers,

Instead of sucking up to the political and corporate powers that dominate America, The Daily Caller is fighting for you — our readers. We humbly ask you to consider joining us in this fight.

Now that millions of readers are rejecting the increasingly biased and even corrupt corporate media and joining us daily, there are powerful forces lined up to stop us: the old guard of the news media hopes to marginalize us; the big corporate ad agencies want to deprive us of revenue and put us out of business; senators threaten to have our reporters arrested for asking simple questions; the big tech platforms want to limit our ability to communicate with you; and the political party establishments feel threatened by our independence.

We don't complain -- we can't stand complainers -- but we do call it how we see it. We have a fight on our hands, and it's intense. We need your help to smash through the big tech, big media and big government blockade.

We're the insurgent outsiders for a reason: our deep-dive investigations hold the powerful to account. Our original videos undermine their narratives on a daily basis. Even our insistence on having fun infuriates them -- because we won’t bend the knee to political correctness.

One reason we stand apart is because we are not afraid to say we love America. We love her with every fiber of our being, and we think she's worth saving from today’s craziness.

Help us save her.

A second reason we stand out is the sheer number of honest responsible reporters we have helped train. We have trained so many solid reporters that they now hold prominent positions at publications across the political spectrum. Hear a rare reasonable voice at a place like CNN? There’s a good chance they were trained at Daily Caller. Same goes for the numerous Daily Caller alumni dominating the news coverage at outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, Daily Wire and many others.

Simply put, America needs solid reporters fighting to tell the truth or we will never have honest elections or a fair system. We are working tirelessly to make that happen and we are making a difference.

Since 2010, The Daily Caller has grown immensely. We're in the halls of Congress. We're in the Oval Office. And we're in up to 20 million homes every single month. That's 20 million Americans like you who are impossible to ignore.

We can overcome the forces lined up against all of us. This is an important mission but we can’t do it unless you — the everyday Americans forgotten by the establishment — have our back.

Please consider becoming a Daily Caller Patriot today, and help us keep doing work that holds politicians, corporations and other leaders accountable. Help us thumb our noses at political correctness. Help us train a new generation of news reporters who will actually tell the truth. And help us remind Americans everywhere that there are millions of us who remain clear-eyed about our country's greatness.

In return for membership, Daily Caller Patriots will be able to read The Daily Caller without any of the ads that we have long used to support our mission. We know the ads drive you crazy. They drive us crazy too. But we need revenue to keep the fight going. If you join us, we will cut out the ads for you and put every Lincoln-headed cent we earn into amplifying our voice, training even more solid reporters, and giving you the ad-free experience and lightning fast website you deserve.

Patriots will also be eligible for Patriots Only content, newsletters, chats and live events with our reporters and editors. It's simple: welcome us into your lives, and we'll welcome you into ours.

We can save America together.

Become a Daily Caller Patriot today.

Signature

Neil Patel