Should Peter Orszag have been OMB director?

(Mike Segar - Reuters) I don’t think the interesting question is whether Peter Orszag wanted the job of OMB director. I think it’s whether Barack Obama should’ve given him the job of OMB director. Remember, before Orszag joined the administration, he was leading the Congressional Budget Office, where he’d embarked on a one-man crusade to convince Congress of the economic necessity of health-care reform. And CBO ended up being absolutely crucial to the bill’s passage.

Now, I don’t think the agency’s estimates would’ve been very different if Orszag had stuck around. A lot of the modeling CBO used was developed during Orszag’s time there. But I think Orszag was more convinced than his successor, Doug Elmendorf, of the wisdom and urgency of the project, and that would’ve come through in both his testimony and in his private dealings with members of Congress. Perhaps that wouldn’t have made much of a difference. But perhaps it would’ve, at least insofar as CBO would’ve spoken more clearly and forcefully throughout the debate, and worked harder to keep its estimates from being misinterpreted or incorrectly spun. For what it’s worth, when Orszag was named to OMB, I was just completing a profile of him, and I had been predicting around the office that he’d be left at CBO because he was more valuable to the Obama administration there.

But the Obama administration did a lot of that kind of thing when they took office. Although you could’ve made a case for Orszag at OMB, as there was obvious value in having a budget director who understood CBO, it was harder to explain why the White House named Iowa’s Tom Vilsack, Arizona’s Janet Napolitano, Colorado’s Ken Salazar and Kansas’s Kathleen Sebelius to Cabinet posts given that they were the most popular Democrats in states where a Senate seat was in-cycle in 2010. The Obama administration tried to hire “the best people for the job,” but it gave short shrift to the consequences of taking those people out of the jobs they were already holding and races they were considering/could be cajoled into entering.