Budget Expert Says Farewell to OMB After Long Career

Emery joined the Labor Department as a management trainee earning $8,436 a year and soon won a temporary assignment to the budget agency. In 1969, he landed a full-time job as a budget examiner scrutinizing education programs for the disadvantaged. He worked at the U.S. Office of Education from 1972 to 1975 and the Congressional Budget Office for 11 years before returning to the OMB in 1986.

Not many civil servants have been around longer. About 8,000 federal workers have a tenure of 40 years or more. The longest-serving, a program specialist at the Agriculture Department, has been on the job for more than 68 years, according to the Office of Personnel Management.

As head of the budget review division, Emery supervised a staff of 60 who collectively support the director of the OMB, providing budget estimates, giving strategic advice during budget negotiations and analyzing the fiscal implications of pending legislation. The division also helps guide all executive branch agencies in developing and implementing their budgets, and compiles all but the slimmest of the four volumes of the president's annual budget proposal.

Such work earned Emery $148,000 a year. It required he work 80-hour weeks during the busy times and 55-hour weeks during the slow ones.

"There's virtually no policy issue that the government addresses that does not ultimately get tied into a budget debate," he said with a genuine sense of accomplishment. "There are times when we have to identify gimmicks that the Congress is using or to construct a proposal to provide funding in a creative way."

Emery credits David A. Stockman, President Ronald Reagan's first budget director, with engineering the biggest and most enduring change in federal budgeting that he has seen in his long tenure. "Since 1981, we have shifted from a bottom-up budget to a top-down budget," Emery said. "Our primary concern today is not how much money we provide for an individual agency, but whether or not we can reduce the deficit in a timely fashion, whether we can address the long-term liabilities of the government in an effective way. I think it's a necessary shift."

For the first time in decades, Emery has the luxury of not having to think about numbers. On Aug. 5, he and his wife, Susan, and their two cats will leave their house in Rockville and set out for their new home near Las Cruces, N.M. He plans to keep a foot in his old world by working part time as a consultant to fledgling budget institutions in developing countries.

"I've enjoyed what I've done," Emery said. "I look forward to actually having a more relaxed schedule, but I'm not leaving at all because it has stopped being interesting. It continues to be interesting, and there are certainly a great many issues left to be solved. It's just the right time."