Obama nominates Jacob Lew to head Office of Management and Budget

[Better Believe It]

Obama nominates Jacob Lew to head Office of Management and Budget
By Anne E. Kornblut and Ed O'Keefe
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Lew, who will replace Peter Orszag, held the same job in the Clinton administration, and Obama praised him for helping to balance the federal budget in the 1990s. He "handed the next administration a record $236 billion budget surplus," the president said, and called on his new appointee to "use his extraordinary skill and experience to cut down that deficit and put our nation back on a fiscally responsible path."

Widely admired as a manager and policy wonk, Lew is expected to win easy Senate confirmation. Secretary Clinton, in a letter to State Department employees on Tuesday, described her deputy's appointment as "bittersweet." She wrote, "While I was hoping never to have to replace Jack, the President and our country need his leadership at OMB."

Senators may ask Lew about his pay package from Citigroup, where he served as an executive between his stints in the Clinton and Obama administrations. He received $1.1 million in salary and discretionary cash compensation in 2008 as a managing director of the banking giant -- which took tens of millions of dollars in government bailout money -- and he earned hundreds of thousands of dollars in restricted stock upon his departure, documents show.

In the job of OMB chief, Lew would be responsible for drawing up a budget plan by February to reduce the federal deficit to 3 percent of the size of the economy by 2015. The current deficit is $1.3 trillion -- more than 9 percent of the economy. To meet the goal, he probably would have to entertain the possibilities of tax increases and cuts to popular entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/13/AR2010071302611.html