Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and a small group of conservative House lawmakers are pushing House Republicans to go after all of the mandatory spending in the Affordable Care Act, claiming that Democrats snuck in $105 billion in hidden mandatory spending into the health care law. “This is something that wasn’t known,” Bachmann said on Meet The Press earlier this month. “This money was broken up, hidden in various parts of the bill.”

I’ve argued that this spending had been widely publicized during the health care debate and this morning, Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf admitted that the information was, in fact, widely known:

REP. FRANK PALLONE (D-NJ): We considered a bill that would repeal funding for section 1311, the health insurance exchange planning and establishment grants. Did you know about that funding stream?

ELMENDORF: Yes, Congressman.

PALLONE: Okay, so it wasn’t hidden. What about section 4002, the prevention and public health fund. Did you know about that?

ELMENDORF: Yes, Congressman.

PALLONE: So that wasn’t hidden either. And what about funding for school based health centers? Did you know about that?

ELMENDORF: Yes, Congressman.

Watch it:

Bachmann is still fundraising off the “discovery,” however. “As I continue to fight against President Obama’s far-left agenda in Washington, the liberal left has stepped up their attacks against me,” Bachmann wrote in a March 29th email to constituents. “But, despite these attacks I am committed to…repealing Obamacare, and exposing government corruption like the $105 billion the Democrats appropriated toward funding Obamacare. This was a complete circumvention of the legislative process and I am working stop your tax dollars from being spent on an unconstitutional law.” “That’s why any amount you can donate to my campaign today – up to the $2,500 legal limit – is appreciated,” she added.

This morning, during an appearance on C-Span’s Washington Journal, Congressional Budget Office (CBO) director Douglas Elmendorf dismissed claims that his office was pressured to produce politically favorable scores of the health care law. Responding to a caller’s concerns, Elmendorf said, “the truth is I didn’t feel a great deal of political pressure as we analyzed the health legislation”:

ELMENDORF: We felt a lot of time pressure and we were very careful to resist that in the sense that we didn’t rush out numbers that we were not satisfied with and we were often being pushed to move more rapidly. We worked very hard but we insisted that we would do the analysis in a way we thought was right and we could stand behind and we did. There are many who were hoping for different outcomes of our analysis. There were people who thought that our analysis wasn’t right. We received criticisms of that, the cost of the insurance expansions in the legislation would with be more expensive than we expected. We received criticism that the savings through reforms in Medicare would be much larger than we expected. We think on both those issues and others that our estimates were in the middle of the distribution of possible outcomes.

Watch it:

One of the CBO’s most vocal critics was Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), who attempted to dismiss the CBO scoring by suggesting that Democrats had bamboozled the agency with budget gimmicks and that the true cost of the bill was much higher. “These CBO numbers don’t add up when you actually look at the real world, massive deficits, massive debt. And so the Speaker can write a bill, that is full of smoke and mirrors and the CBO can give you the answer you want, but that’s still not based on the real world,” Ryan told Fox News in March.

“I think that one important point to emphasize is that what we produced an estimate of was the legislation as written,” Elmendorf responded today. “There are another set of concerns that the legislation won’t be implemented over time in the way it is written down.” “It is your job to estimate the legislation and people who think it will be changed later those proposal will be estimated by the Congressional Budget Office in terms of their effect and effect on health insurance,” he explained.

In the final days of the health care debate, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) argued that had the CBO used different methods and models to calculate the effects of reform and included different provisions in the final legislation, the Democrats’ bill would have increased the deficit and cut into the Medicare trust fund. This argument descended into the bizarre when Ryan convinced the CBO to produce a report that estimated what would happen if certain provisions of the legislation — like the tax on high-premium insurance plans and recommendations from the Independent Payment Advisory Board — were never implemented and if the SGR fix were added to the final package. To nobody’s surprise, the CBO reported that adding more spending and less offsets, increased the deficit.

Well today, CBO head Douglas Elmendorf revisited this topic and directly responded to some of Ryan’s most frequent criticisms of the legislation. Elmendorf stressed that CBO scores “the law as written” and addressed charges that the budget office double counted savings from the Medicare program by appropriating the same funds to the trust fund and to offset the costs of coverage expansion:

Cost estimates focus on the effects of legislation on the unified (total) budget. The health reform legislation improves cash flow in the HI trust fund by more than $400 billion over 10 years. Higher balances in the fund will give the government legal authority to pay Medicare benefits longer, but most of the money will pay for new programs and will not enhance the government’s economic ability to pay Medicare benefits. (There is a much smaller effect of this sort on Social Security.)

In other words, Elmendorf is suggesting that from the perspective of the CBO’s unified budget accounting rules — which consider the spending and revenues of the entire federal budget over a 10 year period — the new health care law will increase the cash flow into the Medicare Trust Fund. However, that fund is part of the larger federal budget and some of the funds could be used on other legislative priorities.

Conservatives like Ryan, however, were ignoring these long-standing accounting rules to argue that were the agency to suddenly embrace different standards, like trust fund account rules — which look at changes over a much longer period of time – it would find that the law did not extend the life of the trust fund. But this argument is fundamentally disingenuous and it changes the rules in the middle of the game. Every member knows that the CBO’s scores are “god” and that members of both parties rely on the budget office’s scores and models to move legislation. Were Democrats to draft a health bill that comported to trust fund accounting rules, rather than unified budget accounting rules, they could have produced a poor CBO score and Republicans would have undoubtedly assailed them for increasing the deficit. Instead, they demanded that the Democrats’ bill also score well under a completely different accounting standard. What’s frustrating in all of this is that the CBO is willing to entertain these kinds of requests from Ryan and actually produce reports to estimate how much the bill would cost if provisions that were purposely taken out of the bill (to adhere to certain standards of fiscal responsibility) were still part of the legislation.

Last week, Elmendorf said he was “very comfortable” with his estimates. “There are a number of people who expressed concern that we were being gamed, and I worried about that throughout the year,” Elmendorf said. “But I don’t think we were gamed — or at least not in the sense that people seemed to be using that word.”