At the start of business on Tuesday, Aug. 2, according to the Daily Treasury Statement, the national debt subject to the legal limit was $14.293975 trillion. Obama signed legislation that day lifting the limit by as much as $2.4 trillion—with an initial and immediate increase in the limit of $400 billion. By the close of business on Friday, Aug. 5, according to the Daily Treasury Statement, the national debt subject to the limit had grown to $14.536130 trillion.

Over just four days, the debt had jumped $242.155 billion.

By contrast, according to the Bureau of the Public Debt, over the ten-year period from the end of fiscal 1950 to the end of fiscal 1960, the national debt grew from approximately $257.36 billion to approximately $286.33  billion—an increase of approximately $28.97 billion.

Using the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator, $28.97 billion in 1960 dollars equals $220.92 billion in 2011 dollars.

Thus, the $242.155 billion in 2011 dollars that the Obama administration increased the debt between last Tuesday and last Friday is more in inflation-adjusted terms than the combined debt increases of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations in the ten-year period from the end of fiscal 1950 to the end of fiscal 1960.

The figures in the article are accurate, although the author of the piece understates the amount of debt taken out during the 1950s by adjusting for the value of the dollar in 1960, and not adjusting for its value during each year in the 1950-1960 period. The claims made in the article are nevertheless misleading because they obscure the fact that any debt taken on from August 2-5, 2011, was done so in order to spend on programs and agencies whose budget was already authorized — and thus mandated — by an act of Congress.

Because the U.S. Treasury reached the debt ceiling on May 16, the budgetary obligations that accumulated during the weeks and months that followed had to be immediately paid for once the debt limit was raised. The fact that the Treasury immediately took on $242 billion doesn’t mean that the Obama administration arbitrarily took on that amount of additional debt during those four days. Rather, spending had already been authorized by Congress and the Treasury was obligated to pay for it with additional debt, or face the legal consequences of failing to do so.

In order to accurately compare the 2011 deficit with the deficit of the 1950s, it’s important to recognize that the government is currently taking in revenue at a much smaller proportion to GDP than it did in the 1950s, a fact that cannot be directly attributed to the Obama administration. The primary reason for decreased federal government revenue is the ongoing economic slump, with secondary reason being the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts.

According to the Office of Management and Budget, federal government receipts averaged at 17.2 percent of GDP from 1950 to 1960, while in 2010, they were 14.9 percent of GDP. Federal tax revenue as a percentage of GDP is currently the lowest it’s been since the year 1950, after which it did not go below 16 percent until the year 2008, the start of the Great Recession.

As for spending, while it’s true that total federal discretionary spending averaged 17.6 percent of GDP in the 1950s and was a substantially higher 23 .8 percent in 2010, much of that can be explained by the one-time American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the 2009 stimulus law, which is already phasing out. Discretionary spending is projected to shrink in proportion to GDP in 2011 according to the Congressional Budget Office(PDF). Of course, that leaves off mandatory spending programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The latter two programs were created after the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, so including them in the comparison is also misleading.

The increase in debt during the August 2-5 period therefore reflects not an arbitrary effort on the part of the Obama administration to take advantage of increased borrowing authority, but rather a natural consequence of the profundity of the recession and the legal obligation to pay the costs of mandatory spending programs.

“Wall Street banks are unwilling to finance new nuclear power facilities, and as a result these projects are unlikely to go forward without the United States government providing billions of dollars in loan guarantee support,” Rep. Markey wrote in a May 6 letter to OMB Director Jacob Lew. “It is my belief that if any of these deals are to go forward, the terms of loan guarantees for nuclear power plants must be as transparent to the public as possible, they must fully incorporate all known market risks, and they must go as far as possible in protecting American taxpayers from having to bailout the nuclear industry in the event of a loan default.”

Markey asked OMB to explain how Fukushima has affected the way the agency views the risks of financing nuclear plants.

He also asked the agency whether the terms of a $8.6 billion conditional loan guarantee issued last year for a project in Georgia by the Southern Company will be reevaluated in light of Fukushima.

“There’s nothing new to report at this time,” Landrieu spokeswoman Ellie Atkins said in an email.

Landrieu placed a hold on Lew’s nomination in September, citing the Obama administration’s deepwater drilling moratorium, which she argued would kill thousands of jobs and further damage the Gulf coast economy. The administration lifted the moratorium last month, but Landrieu has said she will wait to lift the hold until she has time to review the administration’s efforts to review permits.

Landrieu, other Gulf coast lawmakers and the oil industry have raised questions about the amount of time it will take for drilling to resume once the moratorium is lifted, fearing long delays to approve permits.

The draft staff report said that the White House Office of Management and Budget denied a request by NOAA scientists to make public data about the worst-case flow-rate scenarios from the Gulf oil spill. Lubchenco, in her letter, said the commission “mischaracterized” what transpired.

Lubchenco said worst-case scenario modeling has “nothing to do” with calculating the flow rate and argues that the commission report confused the terminology:

NOAA’s modeling of long-term movement of oil using worst-case scenario analyses was completely independent of the efforts to estimate flow-rate. They are different. ‘Worst-case scenario’ modeling was designed to evaluate where oil may go over time and is not the same as ‘worst-case discharge.’

The letter also dismisses claims that low early flow-rate data could have impacted the federal response.

But the letter appears to suggest that OMB did in fact delay the release of the report, even if it didn’t deny the request by NOAA to release the information. “Due to the complexity of models, the challenges of accurately but clearly communicating to non-technical audiences what they said, and the dynamic nature of the event coupled with the desire to have the product be as current as possible, the work took some time,” the letter says.

One of the draft reports released by the commission yesterday said that the White House Office of Management and Budget denied a request by NOAA scientists to release worst-case flow-rate data. The White House has vehemently denied that claim, arguing that OMB sent back to NOAA a report on the spill because it didn’t adequately take into account a number of key factors. Gibbs stressed today that OMB never rejected the report and said it was not a flow-rate report.

“None of the scientific data was changed whatsoever,” Gibbs said, saying that the report, after it included information requested by OMB, was released.

Pressed by reporters about the commission’s report, Gibbs largely downplayed the findings, noting that it is just a draft and adding that the White House had some concerns about the accuracy of the reports.

Asked if the administration acknowledges any of the criticism in the report, Gibbs said, “There isn’t anybody in this building or anybody who worked on this that would say we did everything perfectly.” But he stressed that the administration mounted a “robust” response to an “unprecedented” disaster. The administration’s response, Gibbs said, “Prevented any of the worst-case scenarios from coming to fruition.”

Gibbs also said that White House climate and energy adviser Carol Browner misspoke “once” on television when explaining the administration’s much-criticized “Oil Budget” report. But the report clearly shows that Browner consistently mischaracterized the report.

Landrieu, who has been a vehement opponent of the drilling ban, has come under fire this week from many in her own party — including Senate Democrats and administration officials — over the hold on Jack Lew, the OMB nominee. But, in a floor speech today, she said she won’t budge.

My hold on Mr. Lew’s nomination will remain for the same reason it was placed originally: the Administration has not acted to lift its ill-conceived moratoria on offshore drilling that are having such a devastating impact on working people and small businesses throughout the Gulf Coast.[...]

The Administration seems to believe that no new exploration should be allowed to proceed until every single offshore operation is in compliance with 100 percent of the revised rules, which aren’t even final.  That is an unworkable framework and an unreasonable standard.

Landrieu’s hold comes as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is expected this week to release new rules on offshore drilling that will likely determine the fate of the moratorium. But the hold puts the administration in a difficult position. Even though administration officials have said they expect to end the moratorium early, they likely don’t want to be seen as giving in to Landrieu’s demands.

The reorganization is part of a broad effort by the Obama administration in the aftermath of the Gulf oil spill to ensure that the oil and gas industry is held to higher safety standards. The administration requests just over $66 million in new budget authority to reorganize the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement (which was formerly the Minerals Management Service). Interior Secretary Ken Salazar plans to separate the bureau into three agencies focusing on environmental oversight, revenue collection and permitting.

The White House also sent to Congress another budget amendment requesting more than $8 million for additional research on offshore drilling.

The cost of the new authority would be offset by a significant increase in the fees charged to oil and natural gas companies for inspections, a move the oil industry is already criticizing.

No matter. Today, during a Senate Budget Committee hearing, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) implied that the failure of the deficit task force bill was somehow Obama’s. Grilling Peter Orszag, the White House budget director, Alexander wondered what “problems” prevented the bill’s success the first time through.

You might want to consider a suggestion about bringing [the Conrad-Gregg proposal] up again, amending it, and finding out what the problems are. It had 16 Republican votes. If the president with 59 or 60 votes can’t pass something that’s important to him, it’s going to be a long four years.  So that’s a good start and maybe there are some adjustments that could be made in the statutory commission.

Or maybe there are some adjustments that could be made in the Republican strategy of blocking everything the White House supports, just for the opportunity to call the president ineffective.

The new directive, from Peter Orszag at the Office of Management and Budget, requires executive departments and agencies, within specific deadlines of not more than two months, to publish more information about their work online in an open format that can be retrieved and searched easily.

The progress report recounts what the administration has done so far to improve transparency, including writing new ethics rules to (mostly) prevent lobbyists from coming to work in government or sitting on its advisory boards; publishing the names of White House visitors; creating Websites that track how the government spends taxpayer money; reversing a Bush administration executive order that limited access to presidential records; and adopted a new state secrets policy. (The report neglects to mention ongoing criticism about the effectiveness of some of these measures.)

The latest transparency directive, while welcomed by open-government advocates, also highlights the fact that the sort of opennness Obama called for on his first day in office still has not taken place inside many executive agencies.

As Meredith Fuchs, General Counsel of the National Security Archive put it in a statement released after the White House announcement:

The Administration appears to realize that even eloquent statements of principle will not shift the bureaucracy’s natural and political tendency towards secrecy.

As for OMB’s new timetables to require more openness, she said:

The only thing missing is a clear enforcement regime, but if the White House, OMB, and the heads of the agencies are serious, then they will use their authority to make these changes real. In some ways that is the test of how serious the Obama Administration is about transparency.

Update: Steven Aftergood at Secrecy News notes that the new directive “does not extend to classified national security information or controlled unclassified information, both of which are to be addressed in other pending executive orders. But it does direct agencies to reduce any backlogs in Freedom of Information Act requests “by ten percent each year.”

Orszag noted, however, that the Making Work Pay tax credit to low-income households — to be raised from cap-and-trade revenue in President Obama’s proposal — has already been funded for the next two years by the stimulus. He also expressed confidence that cap-and-trade could be passed in a standalone bill.

“We have the tax credit for two years,” he said. “We’ve got two years to figure this out. I mean, I think it’s been little remarked that we actually got that tax proposal into law [in the stimulus] within the first month. With regard to climate change, there’s already legislation that is being considered on the House side. The Senate is also active. The fact that it’s not treated in the budget resolution the same way that we proposed in no way means that the House and Senate can’t take the legislation up. And in fact, I think some may argue that the political economy of getting climate change done this year may actually be better outside of the — outside of the budget resolution than inside of it.”

Indeed, both political analysts and environmental activists have argued that climate change legislation would be more feasible and effective if it’s not rushed in early 2009. Still, the reluctance of some congressional Democrats to sign onto cap-and-trade now could be a preview of things to come.