Episode Details

Jon Hartley and Phillip Swagel discuss Phill’s career as an academic economist, his time in economic policy, why the CBO is important in the budget policy process, current law versus current policy baselines, dynamic scoring versus static scoring, the accuracy of CBO scores, CBO modeling, as well as CBO model transparency.

Recorded on March 18, 2025.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

Phillip Swagel became the 10th Director of the Congressional Budget Office on June 3, 2019. Previously, he was a professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the Milken Institute. He has also taught at Northwestern University, the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, and Georgetown University. His research has involved financial market reform, international trade policy, and China’s role in the global economy. From 2006 to 2009, Dr. Swagel was Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy at the Treasury Department, where he was responsible for analysis of a wide range of economic issues, including policies relating to the financial crisis and the Troubled Asset Relief Program. He has also served as chief of staff and senior economist at the Council of Economic Advisers in the White House and as an economist at the Federal Reserve Board and the International Monetary Fund. He earned his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University and his A.B. in economics from Princeton University.

Jon Hartley is currently a Policy Fellow at the Hoover Institution, an economics PhD Candidate at Stanford University, a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP), a Senior Fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and an Affiliated Scholar at the Mercatus Center. Jon also is the host of the Capitalism and Freedom in the 21st Century Podcast, an official podcast of the Hoover Institution, a member of the Canadian Group of Economists, and the chair of the Economic Club of Miami.

Jon has previously worked at Goldman Sachs Asset Management as a Fixed Income Portfolio Construction and Risk Management Associate and as a Quantitative Investment Strategies Client Portfolio Management Senior Analyst and in various policy/governmental roles at the World Bank, IMF, Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and the Bank of Canada. 

Jon has also been a regular economics contributor for National Review Online, Forbes and The Huffington Post and has contributed to The Wall Street Journal,