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A post to ensure taxpayers' money is not wasted
Pressing his bid for a fresh burst of government spending, President-elect Barack Obama on Wednesday announced he was creating a position - a "chief performance officer" - to kill off dubious government programmes and ensure that taxpayer money is not wasted.
- By Peter Nicholas and Maura Reynolds, Los Angeles Times-Washington Post
- Published: 23:38 January 8, 2009
Washington: Pressing his bid for a fresh burst of government spending, President-elect Barack Obama on Wednesday announced he was creating a position - a "chief performance officer" - to kill off dubious government programmes and ensure that taxpayer money is not wasted.
Obama's choice of Nancy Killefer to head the office is part of his campaign to pass an economic stimulus package estimated at up to $775 billion (Dh2.84 trillion). By sending a message that he won't tolerate inefficiency, Obama wants to win over Republican members of Congress who have warned that the Bill should not be larded with unnecessary projects.
"I intend to make sure we have unprecedented measures to ensure that taxpayers keep track of how this money is spent," Obama told reporters at a news conference.
The president-elect has devoted most of his first full week in Washington to a two-track effort to pass his massive stimulus plan.
Obama contends that injecting hundreds of billions of dollars into the economy is necessary to reverse a recession punctuated by a contracting economy, falling home prices and rising unemployment. He has conceded that his programme will inflate the federal budget deficit. But doing nothing, he said, risks "red ink as far as the eye can see".
Bolstering the argument that the economy is in a tailspin, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a report on Wednesday showing that the combination of falling tax revenue and government bailouts has created a projected deficit of $1.2 trillion, more than twice last year's all-time record of $455 billion.
Budget office report
The CBO predicted that the economy's nose dive would last months, with unemployment topping 9 per cent early next year.
Nigel Gault, chief US economist at IHS Global Insight, an economic consulting firm in Lexington, Massachusetts, noted that the $1.2 trillion projection was roughly 8 per cent of gross domestic product - a magnitude he called "off the charts".
To assuage fears that his stimulus plan would only drive the nation deeper into debt, Obama set up the performance office under the leadership of Killefer, a partner at the management consulting firm McKinsey and Co. and a former Treasury Department official in the Bill Clinton administration.
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