Peter Orszag – Director of OMB

After naming a Chief of Staff, Barack Obama shifted his transitions focus to economic appointees, where he chose Peter Orszag Director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Orszag has been the director of the Congressional Budget Office since 2007 where he oversees a staff of 235 and an annual budget of $40 million. He was also a past economic adviser to President Bill Clinton. In his new position, Orszag will be responsible for ensuring Obama’s management plans are enforced as well as executing spending decisions.

Most importantly, Orszag will be responsible for helping Obama carry out his performance plan – a detailed list of promises made to “make government work for the people again.” In the plan, Obama intends to create a Chief Performance Officer and a White House SWAT team who will work closely with Orszag and the OMB to set tough performance targets for Federal agencies and hold managers responsible for progress.

Orszag is one part of Obama’s economic team, which also includes Timothy Geithner, former president of the New York Federal Reserve, as Treasury secretary and Larry Summers, a former Treasury secretary, as head of the National Economic Council. To chair the council of economic advisers, Obama named Christina Romer, an economics professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

Now that he’s named Orszag, Obama will need to get to work on his version of Bush’s President’s Management Agenda, and insiders say Obama’s management agenda will be similar to Clinton’s National Performance Review.

Posted in Performance Wire