Word: omb
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...House Ways and Means human resources subcommittee. One would cut benefits to disabled noncitizens, while the other would deny minimum wage and workplace protections to some welfare recipients working for the government or nonprofit organizations. The attempt to slash welfare benefits for noncitizens particularly peeved the Clinton Administration, leading OMB director Franklin Raines, to inform GOP leaders that they would have a fight on their hands if they fail to live up to the agreement...
Crisis-mongering has always been a strategy of conservatives. They realized long ago that the perception of crisis could permit the politicians to make it look like they're doing something for the beneficiary population when they're doing something to it. This, admits Reagan's OMB director, was the conservative strategy as far back...
...OMB director's job can be a post of unequaled power in shaping economic policy, or it can be relegated to little more than government bookkeeping, massaging the numbers so they justify decisions made elsewhere. George Bush's budget director, the brilliant and calculating Richard Darman, managed to commandeer virtually the entire domestic agenda from his post in the Old Executive Office Building. "Some people come to Washington to take over a department and don't know that they can't do much without OMB's approval," Darman once observed. "But they learn--some more painfully than others." Leon Panetta...
Panetta's departure leaves an enormous vacuum, and Raines appears eager to take advantage of it. In a White House that churns out micro-initiatives every day, Raines has squelched the Administration's habit of making such announcements without checking whether OMB has sanctioned a plan to pay for them with cuts elsewhere. This month he stepped in to require a more thorough vetting of measures that would tighten food-safety regulations. "There were more people running around with their own little pet projects," says White House spokesman Michael McCurry. "Raines has reined...
...first time committed himself to balance, with numbers credible enough to stand up to scrutiny on Capitol Hill but big enough to accommodate the promises he made during the last campaign. Meanwhile, a cohort of departing Cabinet secretaries, whose relationships with Clinton were more deeply rooted than the new OMB director's, seized their final chance to make demands. Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros, for example, facing $1 billion in new low-income-housing cuts, lamented in a memo to Raines that found its way to the Wall Street Journal, "Now is not the time to change course. I believe this...