Word: elmendorf
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...latest dose of reality from Elmendorf's CBO: a forecast that the federal deficit will reach $1.35 trillion this year - $4,400 for every American. All that red ink means the overall debt will rise to $8.8 trillion by the end of 2010, or about 60% of gross domestic product - the highest level of public debt since 1952. "There's a fundamental disconnect between the level of benefits that people want the government to provide, particularly for older Americans, and the amount of resources that people want to send to Washington to pay for those benefits," Elmendorf says. "To make...
...President Obama's limited spending freeze won't in itself do much to address that disconnect, Elmendorf suggests. The CBO director projects that even if such a spending cap were to extend to all discretionary government outlays (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...
...Elmendorf's pronouncement led the White House to regroup. A few days later, Obama summoned Elmendorf, former CBO director Alice Rivlin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Jonathan Gruber and Harvard University's David Cutler to the Oval Office to go over the bills and find other ways to wring out savings...