Lew, Obama's OMB Pick, Faces Dual Hearings and Few Meaningful Questions

Jacob_LewYesterday, Jack Lew, President Obama's nominee to replace Peter Orszag as Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director, went to Capitol Hill for two nomination hearings. Both the Senate Budget Committee and the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee (HSGAC) have jurisdiction over the nomination, necessitating the two hearings on Lew, who was also President Clinton's last OMB director. Too bad we learned little about the nominee during either hearing.

The Budget committee hearing was probably the most useless. Half of the questions were on pet project issues (nuclear waste for Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), Denali national park for Sen. Mark Begich (D-AK)), and the other half of the questions were on general budget issues. Although "questions" is a relative term, since many of the "questions" were really more like lectures on the federal budget, but I guess that's par for the course when it comes to Congress. Lew brushed these questions aside with the answer that we should not be "putting on the brakes" now (i.e. we shouldn't be cutting spending for fear of slowing the economic recovery), but at the same time, we need to deal with the growing national debt soon, rather than later. As an answer, it's the budgetary equivalent of being everything to everyone, although it is reassuring to hear that he believes we need to be working on job creation, not cutting spending. Regrettably, no one in either party thought to ask him how he would actually go about creating jobs while at the same time working on lowering the debt.

In any case, focusing on the budget, particularly by discussing whether Lew thinks we have too much debt or not, is not the greatest subject for Lew's hearing. Sure, OMB has to put together the president's budget, and the director will likely weigh in on any given federal budget decisions, final spending decisions are not his to make. As I pointed out in my post yesterday, Congress itself has far more power over the federal budget than any lowly OMB director. Lew can plan all he wants on ways to reduce the federal debt, but look at what's driving it. The Bush tax cuts. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Medicare. Social Security. All of those programs are driving up the debt, and the solutions to those problems do not involve the OMB director. Indeed, it will be up to Congress to decide how to fix these problems, and if he's lucky, Obama might have the ability to veto their decision.

At best, Lew will be able to affect these issues on the margins. That's why the HSGAC hearing was somewhat better. While there were still vague, budget-related questions, the committee's senators also mixed in some questions about things the OMB actually does. For instance, Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-HI) asked some of the most important questions, one on whether Lew supports Obama's Chief Performance Officer Jeffrey Zients' efforts to reform the hiring process, and what Lew thinks about the current state of performance measurement (for the record, Lew supports Zients, and thinks that performance measurement needs to be more about making programs better, not punishment, to get agency buy-in). Lew, as OMB director, will be responsible for both of those issues, so it was great to hear Akaka ask about them. It was also in the HSGAC hearing that we learned that Lew's top priorities at OMB would be IT procurement, contracting reform, and performance management (which is probably pretty close to the current priority ranking in the agency), and Lew will be able to affect all three of those issues once confirmed, certainly more than he'll be able to affect the nation's debt.

Still, we learned relatively little about Lew during either hearing, other than the fact that he supports Obama's job creation efforts, does not support extending the higher-income Bush tax cuts, and wants to close the tax gap. Lew also talked frequently about PAYGO, or Pay As You Go budgeting, and how it helped Clinton leave office with record budget surpluses. Considering how often Lew mentioned PAYGO, expect to hear more about it over the coming years.

Interestingly, senators also decided to not dig into Lew's last, either as State Department deputy or, perhaps more damagingly, as a chief operating officer at government-supported Citigroup, leaving the public relatively clueless as to how Lew spent those years.

By the end of the day, three Republicans, Judd Gregg (NH), Susan Collins (ME), and Scott Brown (MA), voiced their support of Lew's nomination, a strong indication that Lew will be confirmed by both the two committees and the Senate as a whole (both Gregg and Collins are ranking members for their respective committees). And since Lew didn't give any ammunition to his enemies yesterday, he should cruise through to confirmation.

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) announced a vote on the nomination in his committee for this coming Tuesday, and Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) promised to keep to a similar timetable. Hopefully that means a Senate floor will follow a few weeks later.

Image by Flickr user Screenshots3 used under a Creative Commons license.

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