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  • Education: The Wind at America’s Back

    Posted by Peter Orszag, Director on February 26, 2010 at 2:25 PM EST

    Today, I spoke to students at the Georgetown University Public Policy Institute, where I discussed the Administration’s efforts to promote short-term economic recovery, put the nation on a sustainable fiscal trajectory, and make investments to bolster long-term economic growth. I have written here on many occasions about the first two topics covered in today’s talk, so I’ll use this post to delve a bit more into the final topic of making new investments to promote growth —and, in particular, by expanding access to and the quality of education.

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  • Welcoming the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform

    Posted by Peter Orszag, Director on February 18, 2010 at 10:40 AM EST

    This morning, the President signed an executive order establishing a new, bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. The Commission’s co-chairs – former Clinton White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles and former Republican Senate Whip Alan Simpson – will bring Republicans and Democrats together to help tackle one of our looming fiscal challenges.

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  • OIRA Dashboard Goes Live

    Posted by Peter Orszag, Director on February 16, 2010 at 3:40 PM EST

    Last week, as snow forced federal offices to close, OMB was hard at work opening up more of the Federal government – at least online. Today, we are debuting the OIRA Dashboard, an easy-to-use website that will allow people to track the progress of federal rules and regulations that have been submitted for interagency review and find other relevant information about the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). Putting this information online and in an accessible format is one of the ways that OMB is applying the principles of the Open Government Directive to rulemaking and regulatory policy.

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  • A Short History of Deficit Reduction

    Posted by Peter Orszag, Director on February 2, 2010 at 12:31 PM EST

    It’s been a day since the 2011 Budget was released, and analysts and journalists have written about what it means for individual agencies, specific issues, and states. But let’s not lose sight of the big picture. The President’s Budget represents an important step towards fiscal sustainability: it put forward $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction over the next ten years, even excluding savings from the assumed ramp-down in war funding over time. Including these war savings, the deficit reduction proposed in the President’s Budget rises to $2.1 trillion.

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  • A Dialogue on the Recovery Act

    Posted by Peter Orszag, Director on February 1, 2010 at 6:15 PM EST

    Nearly a year ago, the Congress and the President joined together to enact the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, one of the most sweeping economic recovery efforts in our nation’s history. Since then, and although more steps can and should be undertaken to promote job growth, the Recovery Act has spurred economic activity and thereby helped to avert a depression.

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  • Introducing the 2011 Budget

    Posted by Peter Orszag, Director on February 1, 2010 at 10:00 AM EST

    Today, the President transmitted the FY 2011 Budget to the Congress. In about an hour, he will deliver remarks about the Budget, and after that I will be taking questions from the press with CEA Chair Romer. This post gives readers of OMBlog a brief overview of the document.

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  • Facing the Fiscal Facts

    Posted by Peter Orszag, Director on January 28, 2010 at 4:09 PM EST

    A Wall Street Journal op-ed today by the prior Administration’s CEA Chair, Edward Lazear, observes that the ratio of federal spending-to-GDP has risen by 14 percent since 2008—and that the transition from 2008 to 2009 saw the greatest annual increase in spending in the last 30 years.

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  • The First Cuts Are the Deepest

    Posted by Peter Orszag, Director on January 14, 2010 at 1:25 PM EST

    In May, we released our Terminations, Reductions, and Savings volume. It put forward more than 120 cuts and reductions, totaling $17 billion, to programs that were duplicative, ineffective, or outdated. At the time, cynics said that we’d never be able to eliminate these programs – some of which had been around for decades. And it’s true that every one of the programs has a supporter, and there have been – and will continue to be – vocal and powerful interests that oppose almost any budget cut.

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  • Modernizing Government

    Posted by Peter Orszag, Director on January 14, 2010 at 1:12 PM EST

    This afternoon, I will participate in the White House Forum on Modernizing Government. More than 50 of the nation’s leading CEOS are attending today’s forum, bringing their ideas for how the government can use technology to save money and improve performance.

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  • No Illusions

    Posted by Peter Orszag, Director on December 14, 2009 at 6:29 AM EST

    We are closer than ever before to passing fiscally responsible health reform legislation. So it’s not a surprise that the most reflexively and ideologically partisan commentators are lashing out. Today, it’s the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal.

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  • And the winner is...

    Posted by Peter Orszag, Director on December 12, 2009 at 4:49 PM EST

    Congratulations, Nancy Fichtner, on becoming the first-ever winner of the President’s SAVE Award — a contest for Federal employees to come up with the best idea to save taxpayer dollars and make the government perform more effectively and efficiently. Since voting began on Monday, OMB received 84,670 and her idea was picked from the “final four” as the winner. On Monday, December 21, Nancy will present her idea to President Obama at the White House.

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  • Voting Ends Tomorrow!

    Posted by Peter Orszag, Director on December 9, 2009 at 12:31 PM EST

    As many of you know, earlier this year, President Obama launched the SAVE Award — a program that offered every federal employee the chance to submit ideas about how government can save money and perform better. Over the course of three weeks, federal employees submitted more than 38,000 ideas. Staff at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) assessed the submissions and narrowed them down to the final four ideas presented below.

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  • From the Banks of the Danube to the Banks of the Potomac

    Posted by Peter Orszag, Director on December 8, 2009 at 12:51 PM EST

    During the first decade of the last century when Theodore Roosevelt sat in the Oval Office, my great-grandparents emigrated from Hungary to the United States. On Friday, in the first decade of this century, I sat in the Roosevelt Room – adorned with a portrait of the Rough Rider – for a fascinating meeting with the Prime Minister of Hungary.

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  • Promoting Transparency in Government

    Posted by Peter Orszag, Director on December 8, 2009 at 10:21 AM EST

    On his very first day in office, President Obama signed a memorandum to all federal agencies directing them to break down barriers to transparency, participation, and collaboration between the federal government and the people it is to serve.

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  • Health Care Reform as a Journey, not a Destination

    Posted by Peter Orszag, Director on December 7, 2009 at 4:56 PM EST

    Atul Gawande — surgeon and journalist — once again writes a trenchant article examining a key question about health reform: in particular, how can we improve care and reduce costs? Gawande’s answer: there is no single, right answer.

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  • The SAVE Award Final Four

    Posted by Peter Orszag, Director on December 7, 2009 at 8:13 AM EST

    At the end of September, OMB launched the President’s SAVE Award – a contest for federal employees to come up with the best idea to save taxpayer dollars and make the government perform more effectively and efficiently.

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  • CBPP: Savings Will Stick

    Posted by Peter Orszag, Director on December 4, 2009 at 3:21 PM EST

    One of the criticisms leveled by skeptics of health insurance reform is that the hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicare savings being proposed won’t actually be implemented since efforts to cut waste never stick. "Congress is notorious for passing Medicare savings, and then after the cuts take place and the political groups get activated, we restore all the money," one Republican congressman told the Wall Street Journal last month.

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  • An Insightful Article on Health Care Costs

    Posted by Peter Orszag, Director on November 24, 2009 at 1:13 PM EST

    For those skeptical about the ability to restrain health care cost growth in heath reform, read Ron Brownstein’s latest article on how the bills now being considered in Congress would transform the health care system so that it delivers better care to more Americans at far less cost.

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  • The Team Is Set

    Posted by Peter Orszag, Director on November 23, 2009 at 10:56 AM EST

    This weekend, the Senate completed the OMB team when it confirmed Dan Gordon to lead the Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP). Dan brings more than two decades of professional contracting experience to OMB, having most recently served as Acting General Counsel at GAO. He understands the President’s goal of improving the contracting system in order to provide the best value for taxpayers. Dan will be at the center of this effort to deliver better value to the American people at a lower cost to the government’s bottom line.

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  • A Washington Post Post

    Posted by Peter Orszag, Director on November 20, 2009 at 10:15 AM EST

    In today’s Washington Post, I have an op-ed discussing an issue critical to the country’s fiscal future: health-care reform that provides the highest quality of care and helps stem rising health-care costs. In the piece, I lay out the four key pillars of fiscally-responsible health reform as identified by a group of the nation’s leading economists: deficit neutrality, a tax on high-cost plans, a Medicare commission, and delivery system reform. As the debate moves to the Senate and we move closer to a final bill, I argue that the greatest risk we run is not completing health reform and letting this opportunity to lay a new foundation for our economy and our country pass us by.

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