PROFILE / BUDGET SCOREKEEPER : He Knows What It’s Like to Be the Skunk at a Picnic : Congressional Budget Office chief distills lawmakers’ dreams into fiscal reality.

Robert Reischauer has a toy skunk in his office. Lift its tail, and what do you see? The letters C-B-O.

CBO--the Congressional Budget Office--is used to being the skunk at Capitol Hill’s picnic. Its job is to translate the lofty dreams of lawmakers into the hard currency of taxing and spending. And, in these days of perennial federal deficits, the numbers usually don’t add up.

“We keep score,” said Reischauer, who has been in his job as head of the Congressional Budget Office for a little longer than a year. “More often than not, that makes us the bad news bears.”

But, for all its nagging of Congress, the CBO is its most trusted source of nonpartisan analysis and reliable budget forecasts. The outspoken Reischauer, a 49-year-old liberal economist and only the third director in the CBO’s 15 years of existence, is determined to maintain that tradition.

“Sometimes I have to curb my tongue,” he said. “But it’s absolutely critical to our success that CBO be seen as having no ax to grind.”

That is especially important now that contentious budget summit negotiations are under way between the Democratic-dominated Congress and the Republican-controlled White House.

The White House, known its for rose-tinted economic thinking, has further strained its credibility in recent months by being forced to admit that its deficit projections earlier this year were off by at least $20 billion, and probably closer to $50 billion. The CBO’s original forecasts, in contrast, are proving to have been relatively close to the mark.

As a result, the CBO is riding high again after several years of waning influence. It lost clout in 1987 under the revised Gramm-Rudman budget law. It was hurt even more when an institutional and political stalemate between the House and Senate left it without an official director for more than two years.

“CBO’s credibility was never low, just its influence,” said Stanley Collender, a longtime budget analyst who is at the Price Waterhouse accounting firm. “Bob has helped bring it back as a player.”

Reischauer, a graduate of Harvard with a doctorate in economics from Columbia and the son of Edwin O. Reischauer, famed Japanese scholar and former U.S. ambassador to Japan, seems to have been born to be CBO director. He was present at its creation, signing on as its first employee under Alice M. Rivlin, who brought him along from the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, when she was named the CBO’s original director in 1975.

He stayed at the CBO through 1981, rising to become deputy director. After that, Reischauer was a senior vice president at the Urban Institute until returning briefly to Brookings in 1989, before leaping back into the fray at the CBO.

“We believe that we have found the best person for one of the most challenging jobs in Washington,” Senate Budget Committee Chairman Jim Sasser (D-Tenn.) said at the time of Reischauer’s appointment last March.

Typically, Reischauer makes a joke of his decision to return to a government post. “My wife says I keep celebrating my mid-life crises by taking big pay cuts.” The CBO director receives a salary of $89,000.

Blessed with a playful and self-deprecating wit, Reischauer works well with both Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill. He has managed to repair much of the damage done to the CBO’s prestige during the period when it lacked a director and was forced to rely on acting officials.

“It wasn’t hard,” he cracked. “Compared to nobody, I’d have to be at least a little bit of an improvement.”

Reischauer acknowledged that his colorful personality, helpful as it may be to restoring the CBO’s high profile, also has gotten him in hot water on occasion. Earlier this year, on the day after President Bush’s budget was released, he was quoted prominently as saying: “It’s a ‘Play It Again, Sam’ budget. We’ve seen this before.”

“I heard from members about that,” he said. “It was perceived as partisan. I didn’t mean it in a partisan sense, but I’ve learned how careful you have to be in this job.”

And Reischauer can’t imagine doing anything else right now. “For someone who cares about policy analysis, this has it all . . . . As long as the budget is the name of the game, I’ve got the best seat in town.”