What does the OMB do, anyway? Essentially, it advises the White House on the federal budget and its sustainability — on the efficacy of certain programs, policy initiatives and agencies. It oversees the preparation of the president’s budget proposal, and looks at the possible impact of spending increases or cuts. The Congressional Budget Office — the agency with which it most often gets confused — measures the budget impact of bills under consideration by Congress.

Senate Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell (Ky.), have repeatedly blocked attempts to extend unemployment insurance over deficit concerns. (epa/ZUMApress.com)

On Wednesday night, a bare-bones measure to keep federally funded unemployment insurance checks headed to the long-term unemployed failed in the Senate. Moderate Republican Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine had signed on to vote for cloture on the $34 billion bill. But without Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), who passed away earlier in the week, Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) — the majority leader who hails from the state with the worst unemployment rate in the country — once again found himself stuck at 59 votes. By the time Byrd’s replacement is in place, in mid-July, two million Americans will have lost their benefits, and the bill extending them will have languished for some 11 weeks.

[Congress1] Economists insist it should not be like this. Benefits for the jobless remain one of the most effective forms of stimulus. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moodys.com, estimates that they generate $1.61 of stimulus for every dollar spent. Moreover, expanding unemployment insurance is wildly popular, even among conservatives. Poll after poll shows that a vast majority of Americans support giving aid to the laid-off. And on Capitol Hill, even the most stringent deficit hawks do not object to the unemployment benefits themselves. They object to expanding the deficit to pay for them.

Democrats insist that the benefits expand the deficit, to put new dollars and fresh demand into the economy. Deficit reduction will have to happen, they say, but later. Having the government give with one hand and take with the other makes little sense. In this, they received support on Wednesday from Doug Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, who said that “[cutting the deficit] while economic activity and employment remain well below their potential levels would probably slow the economic recovery.” Republicans, however, have not been convinced.

So, the debate has dragged on. Yesterday evening’s failed cloture vote is just the latest in a long line of disappointments and failures around unemployment insurance, known as UI. For the past nine months, the Senate has devoted hours of floor time and hundreds of hours of behind-the-scenes negotiations to ensuring that the government continues to support those left unemployed by the worst labor-market recession since the Great Depression. And for the past nine months, every bill — every extension, every jobs package — has faced staunch opposition from Republicans. Repeatedly, the Senate has had to turn to short-term stopgap measures rather than more permanent extensions. In the words of one aide, “it is beyond frustrating,” particularly since the measures are so noncontroversial. “Frustrating” has become the touchword for advocates of UI — and particularly for the unemployed.

It was last fall that Democrats in the White House and on the Hill started worrying that the extended unemployment benefits created by the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act — the $787 billion stimulus bill passed in February 2009 — were running out before any sign of a labor-market recovery. The stimulus bill both lengthened the number of weeks of benefits by 13 or 20 and made some more generous, by $25 a week — enough to keep 800,000 people out of poverty, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has estimated.

But by the summer of 2009, the economy had not turned around. The September jobs report showed that the unemployment rate had edged up to 9.8 percent, a 26-year high. Joblessness had officially become a crisis in and of itself. And the stimulus’ expansion of unemployment benefits was due to expire on Dec. 31. President Barack Obama told the nation in a radio address, “[The] report on September job losses was a sobering reminder that progress comes in fits and starts, and that we will need to grind out this recovery step by step. That’s why I’m working closely with my economic team to explore additional options to promote job creation.” Democrats decided they needed to renew the benefits, and to expand them further.

ROUND ONE
Having decided to re-up the federal unemployment insurance benefits, House Democrats originated a bill and passed it with relative ease. The Senate created a stronger version — extending UI benefits for 14 weeks in all states, and 20 weeks in states with unemployment rates higher than 8.5 percent. The maximum number of weeks reached 99.

Senate Democrats anticipated some difficulty moving the measure. They were in the midst of the health care fight, and the bill was not offset with reductions in spending elsewhere; Republicans, they knew, might not come on board instantly. Still, given the horrific condition of the labor market, they expected nothing like the fight they got. On Oct. 8, Reid asked for unanimous consent to move the motion forward. Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) objected. Five days later, Senate Democrats tried again. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) objected. Thus started a month-long battle over help for the jobless while the unemployment rate flirted with double digits.

The Senate quickly became embroiled in debates over amendments — with Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the minority leader, insisting that Reid allow consideration of a provision to ensure that the community-organizing group and Republican bugbear ACORN would receive no federal funding and another provision to filter illegal immigrants out of the workforce. The amendments enraged Democrats, who saw them as pointless, and a tool for time-wasting. “The other amendments are vexatious,” Reid fumed. “They are argumentative. We don’t want them. They are not germane. They are not relevant to this legislation.” Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) echoed his thoughts. “This [Republican obstruction] has become a tactic,” Stabenow told TWI at the time. “We could have [moved this bill] three weeks ago.”

After weeks of debate, the bill passed a cloture vote to move to consideration, 87 to 13. Democrats expected the legislation to race to passage, but Republicans continued to bring up objections, requiring a number of procedural votes and hours of floor time. “Maybe [Republicans] needed another ACORN amendment,” Reid said. “Maybe that would be something that would please them.” (The amendments did not make it in.) On Oct. 4 — 27 days and four votes since the bill’s initial introduction — it passed unanimously, 98-0. It became law in early November, adding two new tiers of unemployment benefits. The bill was a success — but the struggle for it was a portent of the difficulties to come for Democrats trying to extend benefits for the jobless.

ROUND TWO
That same month, the Senate Democratic leadership admitted problems with the extension. For one, the unemployment rate had drifted above 10 percent, seemingly necessitating a further expansion of the safety net. Additionally, there was a serious glitch in the bill: A Dec. 31 filing deadline meant that many jobless Americans would not get the full 20 weeks of benefits. The National Employment Law Project estimated that 475,000 people would exhaust state-funded benefits after Dec. 31, missing the deadline and losing federal help; a further 580,000 would exhaust one tier of federally funded benefits just after the deadline, missing out on additional federal benefits. Congress needed to extend the deadline. And it needed a better underlying unemployment bill to boot.

In December, Democrats managed to get the patch into the Defense Appropriations Bill after some wrangling — but only a two-month extension, to the end of February. Still, it gave them time to focus on an ambitious new bill aiding the unemployed and others hurt by the recessionary economy: pushing back the deadlines for the federal unemployment benefits,  authorizing more Medicaid and COBRA funding and stalling a 21 percent cut to payments to doctors under Medicare, among numerous other measures under consideration. In December, the House passed those measures as part of the Tax Extenders Act of 2009 — later known as the American Jobs and Closing Tax Loopholes Act of 2010 and commonly referred to by its House resolution number, 4213.

Before the Senate could get to it, again, benefits started expiring. On Feb. 25, Senate Democrats asked for unanimous consent for a House-passed 30-day extension of COBRA and unemployment benefits — just enough time to let the Senate get a more permanent fix in place. But Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) objected. “Everybody in this chamber wants to extend unemployment benefits,” he said. “[But] if we can’t find $10 billion somewhere for a bill that everybody in this body supports, we will never pay for anything.” Reid kept on pushing for unanimous consent. Bunning kept on objecting — stopping the Senate from moving forward a total of eleven times.

After a five-day standoff that threatened to stop all congressional work, and after Senate Republican leadership expressed their anger with Bunning, he eventually gave up. The vote passed, 78 to 19.

ROUND THREE
With the temporary extension signed into law, Senate Democrats moved on to a more permanent fix for unemployment insurance and serious consideration of 4213. Reid hoped to extend federal unemployment benefits through the end of 2010, rather than a few months at a time. The Senate included the provision in its amendment to the bill, and the motion passed on March 10, 62 to 36, with six Republicans joining the Democrats and only Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) breaking against them.

The problem? Some argued portions of the bill violated new paygo rules: Democrats could deficit-spend only in “emergencies,” and did the unemployment situation really qualify? Most Democrats insist they do, and have pushed back against whittling down the stimulus to pay for the benefits. “[UI extensions are] done in a way that we have always done it,” Stabenow told TWI. “[Those are] always categorized as an emergency. And, frankly, if 15 million people without jobs is not an emergency, I don’t know what is.”

Either way, the bill needed to go back to the House for approval. And House deficit hawks were not looking kindly on it anymore. Without the bill signed into law, the expiry of unemployment benefits — an albatross following Democrats for months by that time — returned again.

Procedurally, maneuvering to get another patch proved remarkably difficult. The Senate chose to take up a House-passed one-month extension, then to move to a more permanent solution. “We should not let these programs expire,” Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) argued on the Senate floor. But Republicans insisted they would not vote for anything not paid for.

They prevented unanimous consent — meaning Democrats needed to file cloture on the motion, and needed to give it time to “ripen” before a vote. It came down to the Friday before a two-week vacation started at the end of March. The long-term unemployed would start falling off of the federal government’s rolls on April 5. Congress would not be in session until April 12. The Senate failed to move, and hundreds of thousands of jobless Americans — around 200,000 a week — stopped getting their unemployment checks over Easter.

It took until April 15 for the Senate to get to passage of the patch; Republicans Olympia Snowe (Maine), Susan Collins (Maine) and George Voinovich (Ohio) crossed the aisle to support the measure. The bill extended the filing deadline for federal unemployment benefits to June 2, extended COBRA health subsidies and delayed the 21 percent cut to Medicare reimbursements for doctors. It cost $18 billion, with no offsets. On April 15, Obama signed it into law.

ROUND FOUR
And so, Congress turned again to 4213 — the extenders package, passed by the House, modified by the Senate and returned again to the House. There, deficit-hawk Democrats insisted on whittling the portions of the hundred-provision bill down. Compromises took a $140 billion bill down to $54 billion — shortening the extension of UI through November, trimming the Medicare doc fix and the COBRA extension and dropping the additional $25 a week on jobless checks. It passed, but barely.

The modified bill returned to the Senate just before — again — the extensions of UI and other provisions would start to end over the Memorial Day holiday. This brings us to the present, where the bill got stuck in the Senate for a month, dropping extended benefits for 1.2 million Americans before eventually dying.

The death wasn’t quick. On June 18, it lost a cloture vote, 56-40 — shy of the 60 votes needed — with Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Scott Brown (R-Mass.) all voting no. A week later, a pared-down bill lost another cloture vote, 57 to 41. The responses ranged from depression to rage. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) said, “This is one of the worst moments I’ve seen in 25 years in the United States Senate. … Even cutting our original proposal nearly in half wasn’t enough to secure even one Republican vote today.”

Reid broke the bill up, moving just the unemployment extension portion, along with a House-passed change to the filing deadline for the homebuyer tax credit. On Wednesday night, that last stopgap bill died, 58 to 38. Senate staffers say that this is not the end. They will wait for Byrd’s replacement, expected to be appointed within two weeks or so, and then move the bill with Snowe and Collins’ support. They will make the UI checks retroactive for the two million Americans who have been denied them in recent weeks.

But the anger is palpable after nine months of delays. “It’s not just Harry Reid or any other Democrat who needs brave Republicans to step up, for once, for what’s right and what’s needed. It’s the people we serve. We have Republicans ready to protect banks while sticking it to the working men and women of this country while opposing efforts to extend unemployment benefits,” Jim Manley, Reid’s spokesman, told TWI. “This is yet one in another series of cynical and brazen attempts by Republicans to position themselves as the party of ‘hell no’ in November.”

And the unemployed? They are confused and enraged. Yesterday evening, I spoke with Deb Martin, a 49-year-old Ohioan on the verge of losing her federally extended benefits. “I have kids,” she said. “I have a mortgage. It’s been years of this [garbage] and I don’t know what I’m going to do without those checks. Even if they make them retroactive, we might be living in the car by the time they do.”

The economic establishment stresses that the unemployment checks continue to be not only beneficial, but necessary. Testifying before the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, John Irons, the research and policy director of the Economic Policy Institute argued, “Unemployment should reach 6 percent or lower, and be trending downward, before any fiscal contraction should be seriously considered. In fact, with unemployment hovering near 10 percent and with projections putting unemployment at elevated levels for at least the next couple of years, further job creation is indeed necessary.”

But privately, Senate staffers whisper that if this unemployment extension makes it through, it will be the last one. There will be no more torturous attempts to grant unemployment benefits to the 15 million unemployed. There will be no bills to add a Tier V for the million who have exhausted all benefits and still cannot find work. The benefits will end in November.

At TAPPED, Tim Fernholz predicts a “brutal” confirmation fight for Orszag’s successor, and I’m inclined to agree. It’s not that Obama will nominate someone from outside the mainstream — if this list of potential nominees is any indication, Obama is likely to choose a moderate with establishment-friendly credentials — it’s that Republicans are likely to approach any nominee as if he or she were the Soviet Union, resurrected and personified. After all, as Fernholz notes, growing concerns over government spending and deficits make this fight the perfect opportunity for partisan posturing and grandstanding. The OMB director is a bit too high-profile for Republicans to stall confirmation proceedings endlessly (as they’ve done with other offices), but given the clear incentives in favor of delay — obstruction eats up floor time and makes the president look weak going into midterms — I wouldn’t be surprised if this goes on for much longer than the day it took to confirm Orszag.

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) will introduce this language into the Senate Armed Services Committee’s mark-up of the fiscal 2011 Defense Authorization Act on Wednesday. He has the support of chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.); Rep. Patrick Murphy (D-Penn.) for a complementary measure in the House version of the bill during this week’s floor debate; and, finally, the White House.

But while the press today might be writing that the White House deal means the fight is effectively over, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” repeal activists are just gearing up for a grueling week. As I wrote in my piece, the Human Rights Campaign is putting millions of dollars and tons of locally based effort around the country into urging wavering senators on the committee to vote for Lieberman’s text and for the House amendment. Michael Cole of the Human Rights Campaign noted to me yesterday that “even though we have some outstanding congressional leaders, our issues are continually ones that require education and making sure members understand these issues and why it’s important to protect the community.”

Here’s the text of the Lieberman amendment:

Committee Amendment Proposed by Mr. Lieberman
At the appropriate place in title V, insert the following:

SEC. [ARM10802]. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE POLICY CONCERNING HOMOSEXUALITY IN THE ARMED FORCES.

(a) COMPREHENSIVE REVIEW ON THE IMPLEMENTATION OF A REPEAL OF 10 U.S.C. § 654.—
(1) IN GENERAL.—On March 2, 2010, the Secretary of Defense issued a memorandum directing the Comprehensive Review on the Implementation of a Repeal of 10 U.S.C. § 654 (section 654 of title 10, United States Code).
(2) OBJECTIVES AND SCOPE OF REVIEW.—The Terms of Reference accompanying the Secretary’s memorandum established the following objectives and scope of the ordered review:
(A) Determine any impacts to military readiness, military effectiveness and unit cohesion, recruiting/retention, and family readiness that may result from repeal of the law and recommend any actions that should be taken in light of such impacts.
(B) Determine leadership, guidance, and training on standards of conduct and new policies.
(C) Determine appropriate changes to existing policies and regulations, including but not limited to issues regarding personnel management, leadership and training, facilities, investigations, and benefits.
(D) Recommend appropriate changes (if any) to the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
(E) Monitor and evaluate existing legislative proposals to repeal 10 U.S.C. § 654 and proposals that may be introduced in the Congress during the period of the review.
(F) Assure appropriate ways to monitor the workforce climate and military effectiveness that support successful follow-through on implementation.
(G) Evaluate the issues raised in ongoing litigation involving 10 U.S.C. § 654.

(b) EFFECTIVE DATE.—The amendments made by subsection (f) shall take effect only on the date on which
the last of the following occurs:
(1) The Secretary of Defense has received the
report required by the memorandum of the Secretary referred to in subsection (a).
(2) The President transmits to the congressional defense committees a written certification, signed by the President, the Secretary of Defense, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stating each of the following:
(A) That the President, the Secretary of Defense, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have considered the recommendations contained in the report and the report’s proposed plan of action.
(B) That the Department of Defense has prepared the necessary policies and regulations to exercise the discretion provided by the amendments made by subsection (f).
(C) That the implementation of necessary policies and regulations pursuant to the discretion provided by the amendments made by subsection (f) is consistent with the standards of military readiness, military effectiveness, unit cohesion, and recruiting and retention of the Armed Forces.

(c) NO IMMEDIATE EFFECT ON CURRENT POLICY.— Section 654 of title 10, United States Code, shall remain in effect until such time that all of the requirements and certifications required by subsection (b) are met. If these requirements and certifications are not met, section 654 of title 10, United States Code, shall remain in effect.

(d) BENEFITS.—Nothing in this section, or the amendments made by this section, shall be construed to
require the furnishing of benefits in violation of section 9 7 of title 1, United States Code (relating to the definitions of “marriage” and “spouse” and referred to as the “Defense of Marriage Act”).

(e) NO PRIVATE CAUSE OF ACTION.—Nothing in this section, or the amendments made by this section, shall be construed to create a private cause of action.

(f) TREATMENT OF 1993 POLICY.—
(1) TITLE10.—Upon the effective date established by subsection (b), chapter 37 of title 10, 18 United States Code, is amended—
(A) by striking section 654; and (B) in the table of sections at the beginning of such chapter, by striking the item relating to section 654.
(2) CONFORMINGAMENDMENT.—Upon the effective date established by subsection (b), section ARM10802 S.L.C. 571 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1994 (10 U.S.C. 654 note) is amended by striking subsections (b), (c), and (d).

For too many years, the practice of congressional earmarking continued virtually unabated. During the 10-year period that ended in 2005, according to the Congressional Research Service, the number of earmarks skyrocketed, increasing by more than 400 percent and reaching a level of more than 16,000. This increase was particularly troubling because all too often, earmarks are an easy vehicle for special interest deal-making – inserted into congressional spending bills without filter for merit, need, priority, or any scrutiny by the public, the media, or other members of Congress.

The Administration has just completed its count of the earmarks contained in the Fiscal Year 2010 appropriations bills, the last of which the President signed into law in mid-December. Although more needs to be done, the news is encouraging: earmarks are down by double-digit percentages….These reductions build on the progress that has been made on earmarks since 2006, reductions prompted by a series of reforms that then-Senator Obama helped to write – including bringing more transparency and disclosure to the process.

In a later post, he accounts for discrepancies between his numbers and those produced by Taxpayers for Common Sense, the federal budget watchdog.

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.

President Barack Obama delivering his State of the Union; House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) (EPA/ZUMApress.com)

On December 9, House Republicans did what they’d done multiple times throughout 2009. They released an open letter to President Obama, laying out their ideas for a “No-Cost Jobs Plan.” It included, among ideas like scaled-back energy regulation and a temporary tax break for corporations repatriating foreign profits, a proposal for a “spending freeze.”

[GOP1] “A freeze in domestic discretionary spending,” they argued, “would immediately save $53 billion and more importantly demonstrate an immediate commitment to fiscal restraint.”

Over the next month, the “No-Cost Jobs Plan” remained a useful talking point for Republicans rebutting attacks on their “no” votes, a hook for op-eds, and not much else. But in early January, White House Budget Director Peter Orszag fueled speculation that the White House might want freezes in discretionary spending in the 2011 budget. On Monday night the White House leaked the news that President Obama would propose a three-year freeze on such spending, which makes up roughly one-sixth of the budget. In his State of the Union speech, the president confirmed it.

“Starting in 2011, we are prepared to freeze government spending for three years,” Obama said. “Like any cash-strapped family, we will work within a budget to invest in what we need and sacrifice what we don’t. And if I have to enforce this discipline by veto, I will.”

This sudden and hardly expected shift–using the language of personal responsibly that Republicans have used since before Obama took office–has startled members of both parties and economists both critical and supportive of White House policy. And while they’re using the opportunity to needle Democrats on a policy that’s seen as unlikely to shrink the deficit, conservatives see Obama’s decision as a partial declaration of surrender.

“I never met a spending freeze I didn’t like,” Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.), the chairman of the Republican conference, told TWI. He pointed to the December 9 letter and gave his party full credit for appearing to change the president’s mind on spending. “I’d welcome a sincere attempt at a spending freeze.”

“Step one is admitting you have a problem,” said Brad Dayspring, a spokesman for Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), the GOP whip who co-signed the “No-Cost Jobs Plan” with Pence. “Step two is doing something about it. If the president’s come to his senses about spending being too high, we agree.”

As a short-term attempt to co-opt Republican rhetoric, the “spending freeze” promise is a success. The first poll on the idea, conducted by Rasmussen Reports, found a 56-24 percent majority in favor of a freeze, with a slim 48 percent plurality of voters predicting it would have at least “a little” impact on cutting the deficit. It followed multiple polls that have found the public skeptical that government spending can pull the economy out of the recession. That, according to some critics, explains why the White House would grab onto a Republican concept unlikely to have a major effect on the economy.

“It has to be evaluated on political terms,” said Bruce Bartlett, a conservative economist who has clashed with fellow travelers over his opposition to spending cuts in a bad economy. “What’s he trying to accomplish politically by saying this? He’s trying to give the appearance of moving to the middle. As policy, it’s too puny to have an effect even if it’s implemented.”

Bartlett argued that liberal economists’ concerns about the impact of any kind of spending freeze were “overwrought, because nothing will come of this. But Obama’s sending mixed signals to everybody–his own supporters as well–as to what exactly his economic philosophy is.”

Deficit hawks have taken the same approach to the “freeze” concept as Republicans. At best, it points to the right policy but doesn’t get there fast enough. At worst, it’s a distraction from more deeply-needed cuts.

“We wouldn’t oppose this,” said Josh Gordon, director of policy at the budget watchdog group The Concord Coalition. “It’s an acknowledgment that the deficit is a problem. You have to start somewhere. My concern is that too much political capital could be wasted on small items, and not enough could be spent on long-term challenges, like entitlement and defense spending.”

“Voters aren’t stupid,” said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist. (Conant’s client Tim Pawlenty called the “freeze” concept “kind of like somebody eating three Big Macs and then deciding they’re going to control their weight by ordering a Diet Coke.”) “The spending issue is not going anywhere, with or without this spending freeze. It only pertains to a small part of the budget, not even the fastest-growing part of the budget.”

Conant doubted that Obama had taken a Republican issue off the table for 2010, despite the instant polls. “Republicans do deserve credit for having the president acknowledge a problem,” he said. Other Republican strategists agreed that the “freeze” wouldn’t shift public opinion on which party can grapple with the deficit; one suggested that Obama’s embrace of the frame might make it easier for Republicans to run on government-cutting while dodging the tricky questions of entitlement or defense spending cuts.

“Ninety-five percent of Republican candidates, officials, staffers and advisers do not give a rat’s ass about fiscal restraint or government size,” one strategist told TWI. “At the end of the day, 95 percent of them believe people want to hear about fiscal restraint, but ultimately want government to give them stuff. This is how we default to talking about tax cuts, not spending, because everyone is afraid that if you criticize a spending item, you’ll offend someone. Well, you will. But when you bankrupt the whole country, which Obama’s proposal is not going to stop, you offend millions.”

Pence and other Republicans suggested that the “freeze” concept would come up again in a Friday meeting between the president and their party’s conference in Baltimore. Whatever the long-term political effect–whether or not a “freeze” happens–Obama critics are pleased that a year of arguments for more government spending are being swept aside.

“What he’s doing is actually pretty much what Bush didn’t have the guts to do in eight years,” said Veronique De Rugy, a libertarian economist at the Mercatus Center who has criticized the Keynesian spending policies of the Obama administration. “It’s nothing. But it’s more than Bush did.”

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.”

Spotted in the official White House photo of Monday night’s war council meeting on Afghanistan and Pakistan in the White House’s situation room: Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag.

His name was not included in a list of participants the White House released earlier Monday, but there has been increasing talk in recent days of the cost of stepping up the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan. A quick search of previously-released attendees at the meetings did not disclose Orszag’s attendance.

“Every 10,000 troops would entail a fiscal-year cost of about $10 billion, very roughly speaking,” Orszag said earlier this month at a conference sponsored by Bloomberg News. That comes out to approximately $1 million per soldier per year.

Gerstein’s colleague Ben Smith also made the same play. (Press Secretary Robert Gibbs confirms Orzsag’s presence in the meeting to Gerstein here.) And just so I can hit the trifecta on linking to Politico writers, Mike Allen reports that President Obama plans to roll out a revised Afghanistan strategy next Tuesday, Dec. 1.

Well, that didn’t stop Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) from hopping on board the Boehner train. This morning, she wrote an op-ed in the Star Tribune that kept Boehner’s distortions alive, and then some. She argued:

Any way you look at it, it’s low- and middle-income Americans who will pay dearly for this. According to an analysis by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the average American household could expect its yearly energy bill to increase by $3,128 per year. Using an analysis by Peter Orszag, President Obama’s budget director, that number would be closer to $4,000.

I can’t speak for Peter Orszag, but I have a feeling he would take issue with these numbers, too. A report issued by the Congressional Budget Office, of which Orszag was director until he was tapped for his new post, estimated that low-income families would see their bills increase by $680 annually. But since Obama’s cap-and-trade scheme, as outlined in his budget proposal, would give these families an $800 rebate, they’d actually come out ahead.

Take a look at the first figure in this CBO chart:

Then again, this isn’t the first time Bachmann has misrepresented someone else’s words.

(H/T The Hill)