Peter Orszag to leave administration in July

Where as Rahm Emanuel’s departure remains to be seen,

White House budget director Peter Orszag exit is certain. 

New York Times: Peter R. Orszag will leave his job as the White House budget director in July, according to someone familiar with his plans, making him perhaps the first official to leave the Obama Cabinet and removing a major player from President Obama’s economic team.[…]

While the president recently urged Mr. Orszag to remain, the calendar for drafting the next budget weighed in favor of Mr. Orszag leaving sooner. So did Mr. Orszag’s personal calendar: He is getting married in September.[…]

For all of his recent attention to deficit reduction, Mr. Orszag’s first job for Mr. Obama, even before they officially took office in January 2009, was to be an architect for greatly adding to a deficit then projected at $1.3 trillion for the fiscal year. He helped put together the $787 billion two-year stimulus package.

A longtime scholar of health policy economics, Mr. Orszag also helped devise and sell the president’s signature initiative overhauling the health insurance system. He privately has told associates that having worked on two budgets, a stimulus plan and the health care law, it is time to leave while he is ahead. 

That is some resume, budget busting budgets, the failed stimulus and the national nightmare of ObamaCare. Now that the damage is done, Peter is fleeing the scene of the crime before the chickens come home to roost.

Politico list Orzag’s possible replacements: 

Presidential advisers say two possible successors as director of the Office of Management and Budget each served as chief economic adviser to President Bill Clinton: Laura D’Andrea Tyson of the University of California at Berkeley, named by Obama as a member of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board; and Gene Sperling, now a counselor to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. 

Tyson would provide the economic team with an effective spokesperson on television. And she’d add gender diversity at the top of the administration, especially if Christina Romer, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, becomes president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, as expected. Obama has nominated the current president, Janet Yellen, as the Fed’s vice chair. 

An outsider is unlikely to get the job, the officials said. One possibility would be Robert Greenstein, director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Jack Lew, Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources, was also mentioned, but held the job under Clinton, and so is considered unlikely to want to go back. 

Hopefully one of these new Clinton retreads will inject some much-needed fiscal reality into the White House. I know that is doubtful, but one can always hope.

Via: Memeorandum

Via: The New York Times

Via: Politico