Quiet Maven Steps Onto the Policy Stage

Deficits Challenge OMB Pick

President Bush nominated Joshua B. Bolten as budget director yesterday, handing his tight-lipped policy technician the perilous job of defending record deficits and persuading Congress to cut spending in an election year.

Bolten now must become a public champion of fiscal policies that he helped develop, largely in secret, in his current job as the White House deputy chief of staff for policy.

Ever since David A. Stockman became a celebrity budget chief under President Ronald Reagan, the director of the Office of Management and Budget has been the main White House ambassador to Capitol Hill and the news media on questions of government spending.

Bolten is so immersed in detail that one presidential adviser jokes that he must read the Federal Register at bedtime -- which in Bolten's case is sometime after his 10 p.m., or sometimes even 2 a.m., departure from the West Wing. He had a leading hand in drawing up Bush's economic proposals and plans for the new Department of Homeland Security, and headed the Domestic Consequences Group created in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001.

Yet for all his clout, Bolten, a former Goldman Sachs executive who sometimes parks his motorcycle on West Executive Avenue, is barely known outside the gates. He always has a smile for reporters, but he steadfastly refused interviews as he built his power base as guardian of domestic, economic and homeland security policy.

"He's scary smart, but he has the luxury of not having every word parsed, and he's not grilled by congressional committees on television," a senior administration official said. "Now, the uber-behind-the-scenes adviser has to become the public face of maintaining spending restraint."

Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, said Bolten's role as policy director during Bush's 2000 campaign makes conservatives optimistic about the approach he will take now. "At a time when most campaigns would be trimming their sails, Josh was overseeing and managing and -- I'm told -- arguing for the bolder vision of cutting taxes and reforming Social Security and Medicare," he said.

Bolten will succeed Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., who plans to head home to Indiana next month to run for governor. Budget director is a Cabinet-level job; Bolten must be confirmed by the Senate.

Daniels, called "The Blade" for his thriftiness or for his sharp tongue (depending on who is doing the calling), battled openly with lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Several Democrats said relations will improve under Bolten. "How could they be worse?" one Senate aide said.

Wayne Berman, a Republican business executive who is a longtime friend of Bolten's, said Bolten takes the "velvet glove" approach that former Treasury secretary James A. Baker III perfected.

"Josh will not seek to be an accommodationist to Congress," he said, "but he's very low-key and very substantive, and that will work well on Capitol Hill."

Bolten immediately began delivering a penny-pinching message after Bush, accompanied by Vice President Cheney, announced the nomination during an Oval Office ceremony yesterday. Bolten promised to keep "a very watchful eye on the people's money" and to serve as "a tight-fisted custodian of the people's money."

Bush said his nominee "is brilliant, he is tireless, he remains calm in any storm, he is a man of complete integrity."

Bolten, 48, may have gotten his lack of loquaciousness from his father, a CIA agent. Bolten grew up in Northwest Washington and graduated from St. Albans School before going on to Princeton and Stanford Law, where he was editor of the law review.

He is one of two deputies to Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr., who honored him with a reception in the Roosevelt Room last night. A leading candidate to replace Bolten is Tim Adams, chief of staff to the Treasury secretary since January 2001 and a veteran of the first Bush administration and the Bush-Cheney campaign.

Other possibilities are Jay Lefkowitz, deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy, and John Bridgeland, director of USA Freedom Corps and former director of Bush's Domestic Policy Council.

Bolten will take over a 511-person operation that has an annual budget of more than $70 million and is by far the largest agency in the Executive Office of the President. Besides preparing budgetary proposals to Congress, the office is also responsible for the administration's purchasing, financial management, information technology and regulatory policies.

Carol Cox Wait, president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Budget, has warned the administration that its tax cuts could exacerbate future deficits, but she praised Bolten.

"A successful OMB director can hang out with members of Congress, listen to their concerns and figure out how to trim this corner this way instead of that way, and not offend this whole bloc on the Hill," she said. "Josh is very good at that sort of thing."