Matt Yglesias

The OMB Strikes Back

Tim Fernholz has a good summary of the latest developments in the Orszag v. Elmendorf battle of the budgeteers:

The White House scored a point today in its ongoing battle to convince establishment Washington that health-care reform will succeed at cutting costs even as it expands coverage. The White House and budget director Peter Orszag, as well as the House Blue Dogs, are very bullish about allowing an independent board to pursue cost-cutting measures in Medicare. But when CBO scored the measure to determine if it would be succesful, they produced a very lukewarm estimate. Today, though, a group of health-care experts sent a letter [PDF] to Obama arguing that IMAC, the independent cost-cutting board, would be very effective if done right — and nine of the signatories are members of the CBO’s Panel of Health Advisers, nearly half the membership. It’s a good sign for the White House, and will help push the message that, while CBO’s scores are important, the assumptions made in that office are not carved in concrete.

Not surprisingly, according to Peter Orszag this is a huge victory for truth, justice, and Peter Orszag.

When thinking about both the politics and policy here, it’s important to distinguish between two different administration promises. One promise was that their proposal will be “paid for,” i.e. deficit neutral, over the course of the ten-year budget window. On that issue, the CBO’s word is God. The other promise was that their proposal will “bend the curve,” i.e. reduce the pace of health care cost increase relative to baseline. On that issue, the CBO’s word may matter, but it’s an inherently speculative enterprise and both the White House and Congress are free to see things however they think is best. IMAC is primarily about this latter issue.

OMBlog: You Heard It Here First

In his press conference today, Peter Orzag suggested that he will restart his blog, a blog the world has sorely missed since he left the CBO. Ezra Klein asks “Can I be the first to suggest the name OMBlog?” The answer is “no” as readers of my January 23 post “Why the World Needs an OMBlog” (or, indeed, my January 20 email to OMB Associate Director for Communications and Strategic Planning Kenneth Baer) will be aware. Sorry!

Gordon to OMB

Some new appointees for the Office of Management and Budget including CAP Senior Fellow Robert Gordon:

Jeffrey Liebman, now Malcolm Wiener professor of public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, will be executive associate director of the Office of Management and Budget. Robert Gordon, policy director for Kerry’s presidential campaign in 2004, will be associate director for education, income maintenance, and labor. And Xavier de Souza Briggs, associate professor of sociology and urban planning at MIT, will be associate director for general government programs. (Their biographies, provided by Obama’s transition office, are below.)

Liebman has written against “carve-outs” of private accounts from the existing Social Security system but in favor of add-on accounts. Don’t know anything about de Souza Briggs.

Gordon is awesome. I especially recommend these articles on teacher certification, crime, and conservative myths about the Community Reinvestment Act.

But beyond these qualities, he has the to help Peter Orszag build a true Team of Bloggers at the OMB. Not only did Orszag run the top public sector blog back during his days as CBO Director, but Robert’s been an important member of CAPAF’s Wonk Room team as well as an occasional contributor to TNR’s blogs. You can see his Wonk Room posts here. I think there hasn’t been official word on whether or not there will be an OMB blog (OMBBLOG), but I’m really hoping to see one.

Cass Sunstein to OIR

More appointments:

The president-elect is expected to name [Cass] Sunstein—his friend and informal adviser—to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, a transition official said late Wednesday.

A low-profile position in the current administration, the job is likely to be a higher-wattage one after Obama takes office this month.

Sunstein seems like an unusually high-wattage person for this somewhat obscure job, further reenforcing the extent to which Obama is assembling a real team of all-stars where you have a bunch of people in secondary positions who would have enough stature to take on higher-profile jobs. OIR itself is a sub-part of the Office of Management and Budget and even though nobody’s ever heart of it, it has rather sweeping influence across the whole ambit of regulatory activities. Since there’s talk of doing a big overhaul of financial regulations that will be an obvious focus, but there’s lots and lots of regulating happening all over the place.

Elmendorf to CBO

Doug Elmendorf, formerly of all the major public sector economic policy institutions (specifically the Federal Reserve Board, U.S. Treasury Department, Council of Economic Advisors, and Congressional Budget Office) and then the Hamilton Project at Brookings, will replace Peter Orszag at CBO. Elmendorf’s a moderate Democrat who wins praise from Greg Mankiw. I liked this paper he co-authored on the Bush tax cuts some months ago which concluded that “the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts made most U.S. households worse off” while helping to further enrich the already richest.

Readers may be interested in this and this from him on TARP. I’d be interested to know what’s the nature of the norm that ensures that the CBO Director’s job seems to stay consistently in the hands of broadly respected moderates even during a time of massively increasing polarization inside the congress.

One also wonders if Elmendorf will continue the CBO blog and/or whether Orszag will be blogging from his new perch at OMB.

Rob Nabors

I was saying this morning that I found it interesting that the economic team had been announced in such detail so early. Not just a Treasury Secretary, but all the way down to a Deputy OMB Director. Meanwhile, Stan Collender says we should pay more attention to the new Deputy OMB Director:

For those of you who don’t know him, Nabors is the staff director of the House Appropriations Committee. That means that, with Nabors, the president-elect will have someone who not only can do the line-by-line review he wants (that is, after all, what the appropriations committee staff does for a living every year), he has someone who knows where every appropriated dollar is and, most important, how it got there.

This is part of a trend toward Obama building an unusually Hill-ed up administration. That starts with a President and a Vice President who’ve both moved over directly from the Senate. It continues as you ad some key staffers from both of their Senate offices to the team, and with a Chief of Staff plucked from the House leadership. Then you have people who used to be key staffers for key legislators like Henry Waxman and Max Baucus, and now you can add Nabors to that trend. It’s kind of like an ersatz parliamentary system in which the cabinet is literally made up of the key legislative players.

Meanwhile, Collender has a pizza-related suggestion:

Matthew…How about we plan a series of Pizza Public Policy (P3?) get togethers with readers at some of the places around the country everyone has recommended where we can talk politics and pepperoni?

I think this has promise. Sort of like the Kennedy School’s Pizza and Politics seminars, except with better pizza.

Office of Management and Blogging

If reports are true and Barack Obama is really going to tap widely respected CBO Director Peter Orszag to head up the Office of Management and Budget (it’s like the CBO, but for the White House, so it makes sense) then I believe that would make him the highest-ranking blogger in the history of the United States of America. I was also going to say that he’d be the highest-ranking executive branch official who’s had the distinct honor of meeting Matthew Yglesias, but I actually met Obama twice so that’s out.

As a blogger, Orszag was only so-so, offering interesting content but not enough of it and presented way too sporadically. His CBO Director’s blog would have been a cutting edge public policy blog in 2004 or 2005, but by 2008 people have come to expect more from a blogger. But as an policy analyst, he’s first rate. And from his new, even more elevated position, perhaps he can organize some kind of interagency policy blog. Think CAPAF’s Wonk Room but with Senate confirmation.