The Associated Press reports that Jacob Lew, the deputy secretary for management at the State Department, will replace Peter Orszag as the head of the Office of Management and Budget, beating out other contenders like Laura Tyson and Gene Sperling.
Jonathan Cohn, at The New Republic, offered some Who Is Lew tidbits on his blog yesterday:
[H]e was chief of operations at New York University and then chief operating officer at Citi Alternative Investments. He also served in the Clinton Administration, as director of OMB. Yes, that’s the same job for which he’s now under consideration.
Lew’s politics aren’t immediately apparent, at least to me, except that he’s a lifelong Democrat who, at 12, campaigned for Eugene McCarthy and, at 23, started working for legendary House Speaker Tip O’Neill. Also, during his stint at OMB, Lew reportedly fought to reinstate welfare benefits for legal immigrants.
A while back I cast the White House decision over Orszag’s replacement as a potential choice between a spreadsheet jockey and a pol. Obama has gone with a jockey, one who has already been confirmed by the Senate before and is unlikely to raise much concern this time around either.
UPDATE: In a midday statement, President Obama laid out the reasons he had selected Lew.
This is a mission that requires some special leadership. And Jack Lew is somebody who has proven himself already equal to this extraordinary task.
You know, if there was a fall — if there was a hall of fame for budget directors then Jack Lew surely would have earned a place for his service in that role under President Clinton, when he helped balance the federal budget after years of deficits. When Jack left that post at the end of the Clinton administration, he handed the next administration a record $236 billion budget surplus. The day I took office eight years later, America faced a record $1.3 trillion deficit.
Jack’s challenge over the next few years is to use his extraordinary skill and experience to cut down that deficit and put our nation back on a fiscally responsible path. And I have the utmost faith in his ability to achieve this goal as a central member of our economic team.
Jack is the only budget director in history to preside over a budget surplus for three consecutive years. When Jack was deputy director at OMB, he was part of the team that reached a bipartisan agreement to balance the budget for the first time in decades. He was a principal domestic policy adviser to Tip O’Neill and worked with him on the bipartisan agreement to reform Social Security in the 1980s.
He was executive vice president at New York University where he oversaw budget and finances. And for the past year and a half, he’s been successful in overseeing the State Department’s extremely complex and challenging budget as deputy secretary of state for management and resources.
I was actually worried that Hillary would not let him go. I had to trade a number of number one draft picks to get Jack back at OMB. But I am grateful that Hillary agreed to have Jack leave and I’m even more thrilled that Jack agreed to take on this challenge at this moment.
Jack is going to be an outstanding OMB director.