Say what you will about Dan Crippen, the new director of the Congressional Budget Office, but you always know exactly where he stands on the issues of the day. Since taking office in February, Crippen has shared his opinions on topics such as President Clinton's plan to pump funding into Medicare (it "would do nothing to address the underlying problem"), proposals to build up reserves for retirement programs (they "never seem to work"), and Senator John Breaux's Medicare overhaul ("clearly promising").

The trouble is that a man in Crippen's position is not supposed to prattle on like a panelist on "The McLaughlin Group." The Congressional Budget Office, created in 1974, represents a post-Watergate ideal of government informed and constrained by objective expertise -- an outpost of dispassionate academic rigor in an atmosphere where such attributes are notably lacking. CBO directors traditionally bend over backward to avoid any hint of favoritism, and they usually have -- by hiring staffers of different ideological stripes, carefully avoiding punditizing, and generally carrying on in the manner of a secular priesthood.

All this is necessitated by the Congressional Budget Office's immense authority. The office's budget forecasts establish the size of the projected budget surpluses, and its analyses determine whether a proposed bill would save the government money. In Washington, this is the power of life and death. The annual calculations of the CBO decide whether the politicians will pursue a path of austerity or profligacy. The CBO can snuff out an incipient political movement -- as it did in 1994, when an adverse report from the CBO effectively doomed the Clinton health care plan. In return for this power, the CBO has always maintained a rigorous neutrality.

Naturally, this has not always made the CBO popular. Congressional overlords don't appreciate it when some pencilnecked academic informs them that their budget doesn't add up. But, in a way, that is exactly the point of the CBO. In Washington, numbers are political weapons -- grotesque distortions of logic and mathematics, mass-produced by politicians and parties and lobbyists in order to put a patina of precision on their prevarications and ambiguities. The CBO, in short, has always been a nonpartisan scorekeeper in the political bloodsport of the capital. But now the rules of the game could be changing.

The CBO'S historic strength is not that it always gets it right (it doesn't) but that all sides recognize it as valid and necessary. That is no longer true, though, and the change can be traced to a meeting at Andrews Air Force Base in 1990. That is where President Bush and congressional Democrats agreed to a deficit-reduction pact that raised taxes on upper-income Americans. Throughout the negotiations, Democrats insisted that the burden of the contemplated changes not fall mainly on the lower classes. So, following every twist and turn of the negotiations, the two sides beckoned the CBO to determine the distributive impact of every proposed tax hike or spending cut. To the horror of the conservatives, the CBO charts showed that the only way to reduce the deficit without hurting the poor was to raise taxes on the wealthy.

To the right-wingers, who regarded any analysis based on income differentials as hoary "class warfare," this made the CBO complicit in Bush's betrayal. Their dismay was compounded by new budget rules, which essentially held that Congress could not do anything that increased the deficit. Since it was the CBO that decided what did and did not increase the deficit, this placed it in the awkward position of appearing to foil Republican schemes to cut taxes.

Among conservative intellectuals, particularly the proponents of supply-side economics -- the CBO became a bete noire, the subject of denunciation in National Review, The Washington Times, and The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. So fervently did supply-siders come to detest the CBO that they developed special epithets with which to express their grievances: "Keynesian" is one, an all-purpose insult that supply-siders hurl at moderates in general but apply with particular eagerness to the CBO. They also accused the CBO of practicing "static analysis" -- their name for any econometric method that fails to account for the fantastical growth-creating powers of tax-cutting -- and argued instead the CBO's imprimatur on the Republican claim that Clinton was expanding social spending and starving the military.

Of course, the most important question is whether Crippen will bend to the conservatives' demand of instituting "dynamic scoring." Crippen wrote to one Democratic congressman that he planned to "review CBO's methods" of calculating the effect of taxing and spending on the economy. And, according to one Republican congressional staffer, "Dan has expressed interest in the past in dynamic scoring."

All this has badly shaken the CBO staff's morale, according to Hill staffers and former CBO personnel (current CBO staff members won't speak with the press). The office's professional economists see themselves as apolitical civil servants, and they have "grown accustomed to blustery threats from angry congressmen on the left and the right that always come to nothing. This time, though, the threat may come from their own director, and the staff has fallen into a deep depression, some even telling friends and outside contacts that there might be mass departures. Whether that literally comes to pass or not, apparently these staff members believe that, by suggesting that the CBO is about to lose its nonpartisan professionals. They can give Crippen and the Republicans pause. But what if an emasculated CBO is exactly what the conservatives want?