President Obama today is expected to nominate Wal-Mart Foundation chair Sylvia Matthews Burwell to lead the OBM. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a one-time executive of the Gates Foundation, Burwell served in economic policy roles in the Clinton administration, including as a top aide to then-Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin and deputy OMB director. She will succeed now-Treasury Secretary Jack Lew as the new White House budget chief ( Jeffrey Zients has been serving as acting OMB chief since 2009). - Read more at The Raw Story
ALL DONE WITH DEFICIT REDUCTION? When the president signed the sequester order into law Friday night, the White House and Congress achieved their goal, at least on paper, of reducing projected deficits by nearly $4 trillion over the next ten years. That $4 trillion is achieved by a combination of the $1T in spending cuts through 2023 as agreed to on Friday; the $1.5T in reductions that Obama and Congress committed to in 2011; the $700 billion from tax increases on wealthy Americans; and the $700 billion expected to be saved in projected interest on the reduced debt. Both sides of the aisle seem to agree more needs to be done, as the sequester cuts didn’t touch entitlement programs that largely contribute to national deficits. - Read more at The New York Times
GOP ON DOD FUNDING House Republicans will unveil a hybrid spending bill Monday to keep the government operating beyond March 27 that will attempt to restore more than $7 billion to the Pentagon’s budget.. The measure will keep in place the overall spending reduction under the sequester. But in the case of DOD, it substitutes an updated full-year budget that shifts money to address the GOP’s great Achilles’ heel: the serious danger to military readiness if the standoff with Obama drags on. Congressional leaders and Obama agreed on Friday that the present stop-gap spending bill would be extended in time to avoid the possibility of a government shutdown. - Read more at Politico
WAS SEQUESTER A ‘WIN’? Chris Chocola, head of the Club for Growth, one of the most influential conservative groups in Washington, thinks so. The Fiscal Times spoke with the Club’s leader about how his influence has soared since leaving Congress and assuming the reins of the organization and what he expects in the coming months as talk of tax and entitlement reform heats up. - Read the interview at The Fiscal Times
WRONGFUL FORECLOSURES A new analysis shows that some of the country’s biggest banks wrongfully foreclosed on more than 700 military members and seized two dozen homes from borrowers who were current on their mortgage payments during the collapse of the housing market. Though lenders have already said they relied on false documents to push through foreclosures, big banks including CitiGroup, Bank of America and JP Morgan claimed that borrowers were rarely wrongfully evicted, including military members protected by federal law. - Read more at The New York Times
