The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) will be release its budget and economic outlook report on April 9. Lawmakers regard the annual report as a foundational document. Its projections for federal spending, revenues, deficits and economic growth over the next 10 years will drive budgetary debates throughout the year. That’s why it is critical that the CBO projections be realistic, reflecting the legislative actions most likely to be taken over the decade. Unfortunately, the report has gotten away from that. It is time to revive the alternative fiscal scenario.

The CBO’s alternative fiscal scenario is a more accurate projection of Washington’s proclivity to govern by gimmicks. The current budget baseline, as scored by the CBO, is manufactured to promote higher government spending and higher taxes. The legislative directive to the CBO is to assume all time-limited tax cuts will be allowed to expire and future mandated reductions in entitlement spending never come about.

Under current law, limited trust funds will trigger future reductions in Social Security and Medicare benefits. The CBO instead assumes that Congress will pass legislation to fully fund those programs, implicitly assuming that Congress doesn’t actually intend for the programs to follow current law. The baseline also assumes that spending on discretionary programs, subject to fiscal controls from the 2011 Budget Control Act, will be constrained in accordance with the law, even though lawmakers have revised the spending caps every single year, in direct contradiction to the law and to the CBO’s baseline assumptions.

Fiscal projections are most useful when they reflect realistic budget assumptions. The CBO produced an alternative fiscal scenario in the past. The agency discontinued inclusion of the alternative fiscal scenario following the 2013 fiscal cliff deal, which made most of the Bush tax cuts permanent. Following the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, it is time for the CBO to revive the alternative fiscal scenario.

Many of the tax cuts included in the landmark Tax Cuts and Jobs Act are set to expire. Important business provisions for investment, called expensing, begin to phase out in 2022 and most of the individual tax cuts expire after 2025. Despite every intention of Congress to make the provisions permanent, the official budget score will score their extension as a large tax increase.

The CBO’s alternative fiscal scenario improves on the baseline budget score by incorporating more realistic and likely assumptions that paint a more complete picture of the long run fiscal situation. It makes the simple assumption, based on past experience, that Congress will extend tax cuts in the same way that the agency assumes entitlement spending will continue past trust fund exhaustion. It also offers lawmakers and the public alternative projections that capture congressional proclivity to revise statutory spending limits to accommodate Washington’s incessant appetite for expansion.

There is uncertainty in every projection, but the alternative fiscal scenario offers a more honest accounting of the future fiscal health of the United States. While no estimate is perfect, Congress should work from a baseline that more accurately reflects their likely legislative choices. Still, some argue that a consistent current law baseline is less subjective and a better measure from which Congress should budget.

A true current law baseline for both taxes and spending should be produced, but would be equally subjective in many respects. Just under one-third of federal spending is authorized and appropriated on an ongoing basis. A baseline that assumed programs, entitlements or otherwise, will actually stop spending money when their legal authorization runs out or their current funding sources change denies reality. A true current law baseline would be functionally useless.

A consistent baseline that reflects the current policy of lawmakers, rather than current law, provides the better estimate of actual congressional intent from which to assess the future fiscal situation and score potential reforms. At the very least, producing the alternative fiscal scenario in addition to a consistent current law baseline provides lawmakers and the public with a fuller picture. For a more accurate projection of the future fiscal state of the U.S. budget, the CBO should again produce an alternative fiscal scenario.