Peter Orszag Biography Quotes 2 Report mistakes

Overview
Peter Richard Orszag is an American economist and public executive known for leading two of the most consequential fiscal institutions in the United States during a period of economic upheaval. Born in 1968, he served as Director of the Congressional Budget Office and later as Director of the Office of Management and Budget, playing central roles in the federal response to the Great Recession and in the design of health and fiscal policy under President Barack Obama. His career spans academia, government, and finance, marked by a consistent emphasis on evidence-based policymaking, rigorous analysis of long-term budget pressures, and practical pathways to improve health-care efficiency.

Early Life and Education
Orszag grew up in a family steeped in analytical disciplines. His father, Steven A. Orszag, was a prominent applied mathematician whose career at leading universities underscored the value of rigorous inquiry. Against that backdrop, Peter Orszag gravitated toward economics. He earned an A.B. in economics from Princeton University, where he focused on public finance and applied microeconomics, and then completed a Ph.D. in economics at the London School of Economics. The LSE years sharpened his expertise in empirical methods and public policy design, training that would anchor his later work in government and research settings.

Policy Apprenticeship in the Clinton Administration
Orszag entered national policymaking in the 1990s, serving in the Clinton administration on the White House economic team. Working with the Council of Economic Advisers, he contributed to analysis at the intersection of growth, productivity, and social insurance at a time when figures such as Bill Clinton, Joseph Stiglitz, Janet Yellen, and Martin Baily shaped the administration's economic agenda. The experience exposed him to the day-to-day demands of translating technical analysis into options a president and Congress could act upon, and it established professional relationships that would recur throughout his career.

Brookings Institution and The Hamilton Project
After his initial government service, Orszag became a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, one of Washington's most influential research centers. He published widely on retirement security, health care, and long-term fiscal trends, including co-authoring with Nobel laureate Peter A. Diamond the book Saving Social Security: A Balanced Approach, which laid out a pragmatic, analytically grounded plan for strengthening the program's finances. At Brookings, he also served as the founding director of The Hamilton Project, an initiative associated with leaders such as Robert E. Rubin and Alice Rivlin, dedicated to advancing policies that promote broad-based economic growth and fiscal responsibility. The project became a hub for centrist, data-driven policy proposals and convened economists, business leaders, and policymakers to debate practical solutions.

Director of the Congressional Budget Office
In 2007, Orszag was appointed Director of the Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan agency that scores legislation and provides Congress with fiscal and economic analysis. His tenure coincided with the onset of the financial crisis. Under his leadership, CBO deepened its focus on the long-term budget outlook and identified health-care cost growth as the central driver of the federal government's structural fiscal challenges. Orszag emphasized transparency and communication, including launching a CBO director's blog to explain methods and findings to lawmakers and the public. He oversaw high-profile cost estimates that shaped debates over stimulus measures and financial stabilization efforts at a moment when Nancy Pelosi and other congressional leaders were weighing large-scale interventions. When Orszag left CBO to join the incoming Obama administration, Douglas W. Elmendorf succeeded him as director.

Director of the Office of Management and Budget
In 2009, President Barack Obama selected Orszag to serve as Director of the Office of Management and Budget. From that perch, he helped craft the administration's annual budgets and played a key role in the design and implementation of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, working alongside Obama's senior economic team, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers, and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. OMB's efforts during this period were tightly coordinated with Vice President Joe Biden, who oversaw implementation of the Recovery Act to ensure speed, accountability, and transparency.

Orszag's policy priorities at OMB reflected the themes he had advanced at CBO and Brookings. He championed initiatives aimed at bending the health-care cost curve while improving quality, including comparative effectiveness research, health information technology, and payment reforms intended to reward value rather than volume. Those ideas informed the administration's approach to health reform culminating in the Affordable Care Act, and they aligned budgetary planning with efforts to slow long-run cost growth. He also worked to modernize performance management across federal agencies, arguing that better data and clear metrics were essential to improved public services.

Private-Sector Leadership and Public Commentary
After leaving OMB in 2010, Orszag moved to the private sector, bringing policy expertise to financial institutions and advising corporate leaders on economic and fiscal trends. He joined Citigroup, where he served in senior roles including Vice Chairman in the banking division and Chairman of a financial strategy group focused on complex corporate and sovereign challenges. He later moved to Lazard, holding leadership positions in its advisory business and ultimately becoming chief executive officer of the firm. In parallel, he continued to write frequently on economic policy and finance, including as a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion, synthesizing research and practice for a broad readership.

Ideas, Influence, and Collaborations
Across his roles, Orszag has been associated with a pragmatic, empirically grounded approach to economic policy. His collaboration with Peter A. Diamond on Social Security reform showcased a willingness to bridge academic rigor and political feasibility. At Brookings and The Hamilton Project, he worked with peers and patrons such as Robert E. Rubin and Alice Rivlin to cultivate a culture of policy entrepreneurship. In government, he collaborated closely with Barack Obama and senior advisers like Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers on crisis response and longer-term fiscal sustainability, while his time at CBO underlined the importance of nonpartisan analysis to congressional leaders including Nancy Pelosi. The through-line is a belief that durable policy emerges when data, institutions, and incentives are aligned.

Personal Life
Public service and public communication have been constants in Orszag's family life as well. He is married to journalist Bianna Golodryga, whose work in television and digital media has brought business and policy stories to national audiences. His brother, Jonathan Orszag, is also an economist and policy adviser in the private sector, and his late father, Steven A. Orszag, left an enduring legacy in applied mathematics. These family connections, along with long-standing professional ties across academia, government, and finance, have shaped Peter Orszag's perspective on the role of expertise in democratic decision-making.

Legacy
Peter Orszag's legacy rests on the institutional impact of his leadership and the policy ideas he helped advance. At CBO, he raised the profile of long-term fiscal analysis and communicated it in accessible terms. At OMB, he translated those concerns into concrete budget strategies while helping steer the economy through crisis and laying groundwork for health-care reforms intended to improve outcomes and restrain costs. In finance and public commentary, he has sought to connect macroeconomic realities with decisions made in boardrooms and on Capitol Hill. The arc of his career illustrates the possibilities and constraints of evidence-based policy in practice, and it highlights the value of bridging scholarship, governance, and markets to address the country's most persistent challenges.

Our collection contains 2 quotes who is written by Peter, under the main topics: Doctor - Business.

Other people realated to Peter: Jim Nussle (Politician), Christina Romer (Economist), Doug Elmendorf (Economist)