Word: elmendorf
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...While Elmendorf's career has moved on the same track as Orszag's - before arriving at the CBO, for instance, Elmendorf, like Orszag, had served as head of the Brookings Institution's Hamilton Project, an economic-research program - the two men's styles could hardly be more different. Orszag sought a high profile for a bureaucrat, lecturing frequently and spending so much time in television studios that he carried his own makeup. Elmendorf rarely gives a television interview and says he is still startled when someone recognizes him as he is commuting home on the subway. (Orszag, who was recently...
...major complaint about Elmendorf has been that he is being too cautious in crediting the health care legislation for the savings it could achieve. One of his critics is Peter Orszag, his immediate predecessor at the CBO and the current head of the White House Office of Management and Budget. At one point, Orszag - who devoted much of his tenure at the CBO to laying the groundwork for health care reform - went so far as to accuse his former agency of having "overstepped" its mission by displaying a tendency toward "exaggerating costs and underestimating savings." Among economists, those are fighting...
...Though Elmendorf, 47, hasn't always told lawmakers what they wanted to hear in his year on the job, he has won wide praise for his independence. A native of upstate New York, he taught at Harvard before joining the CBO as an analyst in 1993. Since then, he has done stints at the Federal Reserve, the Council of Economic Advisers and the Treasury Department. "I have enormous respect for him," says Senate Budget Committee chairman Kent Conrad. "He plays it straight, and he's enormously serious about getting it right...
...Elmendorf acknowledges that he has benefited enormously from the work Orszag did before he left for the Obama White House. Orszag expanded the CBO staff, particularly the number who specialize in health care, and produced volumes of research on the subject. Nonetheless, Elmendorf says, the workload this year has been such that his staff has been working six to seven days a week, with computer traffic often continuing until...
...with the health care plan in deep political trouble, the focus for both Congress and the White House is shifting from expanding government to shrinking it. Lawmakers will again turn to the CBO for an honest assessment of what actually cuts the deficit and what merely pretends to. Elmendorf is the first to concede that even the most sophisticated CBO microsimulation model is not the same thing as a crystal ball. "We tell people all the time that our results are very uncertain," he says. "Every number that we give needs to be viewed as the middle of a fairly...