Obama Appoints Orszag OMB Director

President-elect Barack Obama announced Tuesday the appointment of Congressional Budget Office director Peter Orszag as head of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

Orszag, who served as an economic policy assistant in the Clinton Administration, is widely known for his nonpartisan economic policy analyses for Congress and for his proposed solutions for saving Social Security and Medicare.

“Peter doesn’t need a map to tell him where the bodies are buried in the federal budget,” Obama said at his morning news conference, stressing the fact that his incoming administration will focus on how to create a smarter government by evaluating the federal budget “page by page, line by line.”

Obama also announced the appointment of Rob Nabors as Deputy Director of the OMB.

The Republican National Committee criticized Orszag’s appointment, saying that it’s “just another indication that President-elect Obama is most interested in surrounding himself with people who share his belief in raising taxes.”

In a memo, RNC spokeswoman Amber Wilkerson noted that Orszag once suggested that raising the capital-gains tax rate would have little impact. Tax hawks fear that such increases would hurt the economy.

“After proposing over a trillion dollars in new government spending throughout the course of the campaign, it’s clear that the Obama administration’s solution to our nation’s economic crisis will come at the expense of American families and job creators’ hard-earned dollars,” Wilkerson said.

–Meghan McNamara