Word: careful
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...Obama would exempt national security), it would save only $10 billion in the next fiscal year, less than 1% of the budget. Nor is it likely that Congress will make much of a dent in the problem, at least not in the short term. (See 10 players in health care reform...
...Delivering the grim budgetary news is the job of Elmendorf's little agency (250 employees). Over the past year, the CBO took on particular importance in determining the shape and even the fate of Obama's signature domestic initiative, health care reform. It is the CBO that will decide the politically loaded question of whether reform actually saves the Treasury money or instead adds to the deficit. (So far, the CBO has given it a thumbs-up.) The President has focused even more attention on the CBO's numbers by insisting that any bill reaching his desk...
...that is subject to enormous political pressure, seen and unseen, from both parties, Elmendorf is nobody's pushover. In July, he rocked Capitol Hill when he testified that instead of bringing the government's health care costs down, earlier versions of legislation under consideration in both the House and the Senate would drive them up faster. "I can think of 30 ways to say that, that would have been honest but would have gotten less in the way of headlines," says Urban Institute president Robert Reischauer, one of Elmendorf's predecessors as the head of the CBO. "I fired...
...major complaint about Elmendorf has been that he is being too cautious in crediting the health care legislation for the savings it could achieve. One of his critics is Peter Orszag, his immediate predecessor at the CBO and the current head of the White House Office of Management and Budget. At one point, Orszag - who devoted much of his tenure at the CBO to laying the groundwork for health care reform - went so far as to accuse his former agency of having "overstepped" its mission by displaying a tendency toward "exaggerating costs and underestimating savings." Among economists, those are fighting...
...Elmendorf acknowledges that he has benefited enormously from the work Orszag did before he left for the Obama White House. Orszag expanded the CBO staff, particularly the number who specialize in health care, and produced volumes of research on the subject. Nonetheless, Elmendorf says, the workload this year has been such that his staff has been working six to seven days a week, with computer traffic often continuing until...