White House budget director Peter Orszag plans to leave government in July, becoming the first member of President Barack Obama’s Cabinet to depart, administration officials said Monday.
Presidential advisers say Orszag’s two most likely successors as director of the Office of Management and Budget each served as chief economic adviser to President Bill Clinton: Laura D’Andrea Tyson of the University of California at Berkeley, named by Obama as a member of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board; and Gene Sperling, now a counselor to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.
Tyson would provide the economic team with an effective spokesperson on television. And she’d add gender diversity at the top of the administration, especially if Christina Romer, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, becomes president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, as expected. Obama has nominated the current president, Janet Yellen, as the Fed’s vice chair.
