Back to Officials
Name: Orszag, Peter
Current Position: Former Director
Peter R. Orszag served as the seventh director of the Congressional Budget Office from January 18, 2007, until Barack Obama's inauguration on January 20, 2009, at which time Orszag took over as director of the Office of Management and Budget.
Orszag graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1987 and summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1991. He received an MSc and a PhD in economics from the London School of Economics in 1992 and 1997, respectively.
Orszag was research officer at the Centre for Economic Performance from 1992-1993, economic adviser for the Macroeconomic and Fiscal Unit of the Russian Ministry of Finance (1993), staff economist for the Council of Economic Advisers from 1993-1994, and a member of the professional research staff for the Centre for Economic Performance (London School of Economics) from 1994 to 1995.
He served as economist and then senior adviser to the President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers from 1995-1996. He was senior economic adviser, and then Special Assistant to the President for Economic Policy on the National Economic Council from 1997 to 1998.
From 1998-2000, Orszag was president of Sebago Associates, a policy consulting firm. During this time, he also worked as a consultant at McKinsey and Company in San Francisco in 1998, helping one of the nation’s largest HMOs on developing its budget, then as a lecturer at UC Berkeley from 1999 to 2000.
In 2001, Orszag became a Senior Fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institute. There, he also worked as a Joseph A. Pechman Fellow in Tax and Fiscal Policy (2001-2007), co-director of the Tax Policy Center (2003-2007), and Deputy Director of Economic Studies (2006-2007). Concurrently, he served as director of the Retirement Security Project from 2004 to 2007 and was a research professor at Georgetown University and director of The Hamilton Project from 2005 to 2007.
On November 25, 2008, President-Elect Barack Obama announced that he had chosen Orszag to be director of the Office of Management and Budget. Orszag served until July 30, 2010.
Money Talks (by Ryan Lizza, New Yorker)