More White House Turnover

President Bush has appointed Jim Nussle, 46, to replace White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Rob Portman, 51, who resigned Tuesday.

Portman had held the position 14 months; prior to that, he was the United States Trade Representative and an Ohio Congressman. Just last week, President Bush announced that Ed Gillespie, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, was replacing Dan Bartlett as White House counselor.

Nussle, a former Congressman from Iowa, was unsuccessful in his bid for Governor last year. As House Budget Committee Chair from 2001-2006, Nussle was the principal player in securing Congressional adoption of Bush's budgets. That legacy could make his confirmation hearings bombastic; he would be the fourth OMB director working for Bush.

Can we expect Nussle to tackle budget deficits? Not with that track record.

Can we attribute budget deficits to tax and spend policies? Yes, if you go by this 2002 analysis of Bush tax cuts:

Bush OMB Director Mitch Daniels and his staff caught some well-deserved flak last month for issuing a press release making the--false--claim that the 2001 tax cut was responsible for only 15% of the ten-year deterioration of the fiscal balance, and then for trying to pretend that they had not issued such a press release...

... Daniels's dropping of the share of the deterioration in the deficit over the next ten years attributable to the 2001 tax cut from 50 percent (a rough consensus estimate) to 15 percent (in the now 'retracted' OMB July 12 press release) to zero (last Friday) has attracted remarkably little attention.

The crystal ball in 2002 was a little cloudy. According to the CBO last August, the budget deficit was equivalent to lost revenue from the 2001 tax cut, including interest to borrow that sum. This means that the consensus view in 2002 was off by half.

The current federal deficit is 8.8 trillion dollars.

In April, Bush made Susan Dudley administrator of the OMB Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in a recess appointment, a deliberate circumvention of the Senate confirmation process. Bush first nominated her for this position in 2006; it died in committee. He renominated her in January 2007.

When Bush nominated Portman last April, he said, "[T]he job of the OMB Director is to ensure that the government spends the taxpayers' money wisely." The OMB is the largest office within the Executive Office of the President of the United States (EOP) and employs 500. In February 2005, OMB reported that spending growth under Bush averaged 7.4 per cent a year compared with 3.5 per cent under Bill Clinton.

See the US Budget Process; US Gross National Debt As Percent of Gross Domestic Product. More from the LA Times and The Guardian.