Orszag again


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Obama picks Orszag to run budget office

By Jeanne Sahadi

President-elect Barack Obama on Tuesday nominated Peter Orszag to head the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which is the president’s chief number-crunching department.

As OMB director, Orszag, 40, would prepare the president’s federal budget proposals for Congress and analyze the effectiveness of government programs and policies, as well as have a big role in determining funding priorities for federal dollars.
Orszag has also been a frank voice on the growth in the country’s deficit and the shortfalls in the Social Security and Medicare programs.

“The nation is on an unsustainable fiscal course,” Orszag said in September, before the Treasury and Federal Reserve committed over a trillion dollars to stem the credit crisis, at least some of which the government is expected to make back over time.


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Re: Orszag to head OMB


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(email exhange)

Hopefully it’s something like 3 steps forward and only 1 or 2 steps back…

>   
>   On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 1:29 AM, Scott wrote:
>   
>   Looks like Orszag’s the man to get the long run budget “under control”
>   and this is why Obama waited till Tuesday to talk about it in detail. Bad
>   news–the fiscal gap and generational accounting come to the White
>   House (Orszag already incorporated them into CBO reports). As I said
>   before, they may never get to the “long run” with this approach.
>   

Orszag expected to join Obama team Tuesday

Two sources close to the transition tell CNN that on Tuesday, President-elect Barack Obama will officially unveil Peter Orszag as his nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget at a press conference in Chicago.

Obama hinted at this at an event Monday, when he suggested his Tuesday event would focus on finding cuts in the federal budget to help dig the nation out of the fiscal crisis.

“Full recovery will not happen immediately,” Obama told reporters. “And to make the investments we need, we’ll have to scour our federal budget, line by line, and make meaningful cuts and sacrifices as well, something I will be discussing further tomorrow.”


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