Jul 15 2010
President Barack Obama announced his intentions Tuesday to nominate Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources Jack Lew to be the new director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Foreign Policy's blog "The Cable" reports.
"In a statement, Obama said that Lew had agreed to take the job to replace outgoing OMB director Peter Orszag, who announced last month he would resign and join the Council on Foreign Relations," according to the blog (Rogin, 7/13).
"Lew, 54 years old, is a top State Department official overseeing the agency's budget and economic operations. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said the White House hasn't completed the paperwork necessary to formally nominate the new budget director, so confirmation is likely to slip until early this fall. State Department spokesman Philippe Reines said [Lew's] deputy secretary of state position, newly formed, will be filled, but he didn't have a timeframe," the Wall Street Journal reports (Weisman, 7/14).
As OMB director, "Lew would be reprising a role ... that he played for Bill Clinton," Agence France-Presse notes, adding that Lew is "likely" to be confirmed by the Senate. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton sent a message to U.S. diplomats describing Lew's nomination as "bittersweet." Clinton also said he had been a "tireless and effective advocate" for the State Department and USAID (Collinson, 7/14).
"One of Lew's main jobs at OMB will be to prepare the fiscal 2012 budget," writes "The Cable." Before that, Lew "will have to defend the fiscal 2011 budget, which is slowly making its way through Congress," according to the blog (7/13).
"State Department hands and foreign policy watchers say Clinton is likely to reach outside of the building to replace him," Politico's Laura Rozen reports on her blog (7/13).
 This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
|