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  • Introducing the 2011 Budget

    Posted by Peter Orszag, Director on February 1, 2010 at 11:00 AM EDT

    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 5:09 PM EDT

    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 2:25 PM EDT

    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put forward more than 120 cuts and reductions, totaling $17 billion, to programs that were duplicative, ineffective, or outdated.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 2:12 PM EDT

    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 7:29 AM EDT

    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 5:49 PM EDT

    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 1:31 PM EDT

    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 1:51 PM EDT

    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 11:21 AM EDT

    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 5:56 PM EDT

    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 9:13 AM EDT

    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 4:21 PM EDT

    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 2:13 PM EDT

    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 11:56 AM EDT

    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 11:15 AM EDT

    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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  • Reducing Improper Payments

    Posted by Peter Orszag, Director on November 18, 2009 at 11:25 AM EDT

    Each year, taxpayers lose billions of dollars in wasteful improper payments by the federal government to individuals, organizations, and contractors. "Improper payments" is an umbrella term that covers a number of financial transactions — overpayments to individuals or firms is one example; benefit payments to ineligible program participants is another. In 2008, improper payments totaled $72 billion; in 2009, they totaled $98 billion — an increase driven by improved detection and the significant increase in federal outlays associated with the economic downturn. These errors and mistakes are unacceptable. Taxpayers deserve to know that their dollars are being spent wisely and effectively.

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  • Fiscally Responsible Health Reform Redux

    Posted by Peter Orszag, Director on November 10, 2009 at 3:07 PM EDT

    Every two weeks or so, there seems to be a story ringing the alarm bells over the fiscal dimension of health reform. As I've said time and again, the President is committed to signing a health reform bill that is deficit neutral in the first decade — and deficit reducing thereafter. The legislation under consideration in the Senate and the bill passed Saturday by the House both meet these tests.

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  • Step Right Up

    Posted by Peter Orszag, Director on November 5, 2009 at 5:05 PM EDT

    Last Friday marked the end of the first month of the OMB pedometer challenge. As a team, we took a whopping 51,337,900 in the first month. This is equivalent to walking almost 26,000 miles — over a thousand miles more than walking the full circumference of the earth. Quite an accomplishment.

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  • Rescue, Recovery, and Reining in Deficits

    Posted by Peter Orszag, Director on November 3, 2009 at 1:18 PM EDT

    I delivered a speech today at New York University about the Administration’s efforts to jumpstart the economy and to build a secure and prosperous recovery by putting the nation on a path to fiscal sustainability — issues that are especially important to the students of today and generations to come.

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  • Improving our Performance

    Posted by Peter Orszag, Director on October 29, 2009 at 4:08 PM EDT

    Today on Capitol Hill, OMB Deputy Director for Management Jeff Zients testified in front of the Senate Budget Committee about the Administration’s efforts to improve the performance of the federal government so that it is more efficient and effective.

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