Doug Elmendorf's Promotion: Well, It's Not the Treasury Secretaryship, But It *Is* a More Powerful Job...
A message from Dismal Scientist and Professional Bureaucrat Robert Sunshine:
This afternoon, Dr. Douglas W. Elmendorf was appointed Director of the Congressional Budget Office by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and President Pro Tempore of the Senate Robert C. Byrd. He is the eighth Director of CBO---following in the footsteps of Alice M. Rivlin, Rudolph G. Penner, Robert D. Reischauer, June E. O'Neill, Dan L. Crippen, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, and Peter R. Orszag.
Before he came to CBO, Dr. Elmendorf was a senior fellow in the Economic Studies program at the Brookings Institution. As the Edward M. Bernstein Scholar, Dr. Elmendorf served as coeditor of Brookings Papers on Economic Activity and the director of the Hamilton Project, an initiative to promote economic growth. His areas of expertise are macroeconomics, the financial system, public economics, and fiscal policy, and his latest research at Brookings focused on policy responses to the current mortgage and financial crisis and on economic volatility at the aggregate and household levels.
Dr. Elmendorf was previously an assistant professor at Harvard University, a principal analyst at the Congressional Budget Office, a senior economist at the White House's Council of Economic Advisers, a deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the Treasury Department, and an assistant director of the Division of Research and Statistics at the Federal Reserve Board. In those positions, he worked on budget policy, Social Security, Medicare and health care generally, financial markets, macroeconomic analysis and forecasting, and other topics. He earned his Ph.D. and A.M. in economics from Harvard University, where he was a National Science Foundation graduate fellow, and his A.B. summa cum laude from Princeton University.
