Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget
organization
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) charitable organization and think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C., which advocates for public policy to reduce the federal budget deficit and lower government spending. The CRFB describes itself as "nonpartisan", as do many media outlets. The New York Times, more descriptively, said that the CFRB is a "centrist business-supported group dedicated to lower deficits".
It was founded in 1981 by former United States Representative Robert Giaimo (D-CT) and United States Senator Henry Bellmon (R-OK), and its board of directors includes past heads of the House and Senate Budget Committees, the Congressional Budget Office, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Government Accountability Office.
History
Founding and Cost Containment Coalition
The organization was founded by former representative and chair of the House Budget Committee Robert Giaimo (D-CT) and former senator and ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee member Henry Bellmon (R-OK) on June 10, 1981. After leaving Congress, the two created the CFRB with members including other former Budget Committee chairmen, former directors of the Office of Management and Budget, economists, and businessmen.
In the 1990s the CRFB formed the Cost Containment Coalition, led by then-president Carol Cox Wait. Paul Blumenthal and Ryan Grim in HuffPost criticized the CRFB for receiving funding from Philip Morris, a multi-national tobacco company, and the Tobacco Institute during this period. Cox Wait was also criticized for her personal connections to Philip Morris, as she was a "corporate affairs consultant" for the company and was married to Philip Morris vice president Bob Wait. An "inter-office correspondence" memo says that the Coalition was thought up by employees at Philip Morris but was going to be formed "under the auspices of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget," and that its purpose was to take "the focus away from excise taxes." The Coalition lobbied against an excise tax on tobacco under consideration by the Clinton administration.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5152963. VIAF identifies the subject as 129095428. The Library of Congress control number is n86856973. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1981.
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This entry incorporates text from “Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.