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Office of Management and Budget
Agency overview
Formed	1970
Preceding Agency	Bureau of the Budget
Headquarters	Old Executive Office Building
Employees	500
Annual Budget	$70.9 million (2008)
Agency Executives	Jim Nussle, Director   Stephen S. McMillin, Deputy Director
Parent agency	Executive Office of the President of the United States
Website
www.whitehouse.gov/omb

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is a Cabinet level and is the largest office within the Executive Office of the President of the United States (EOP) and is an important conduit by which the White House oversees the activities of federal agencies. OMB is tasked with giving expert advice to senior White House officials on a range of topics relating to federal policy, management, legislative, regulatory, and budgetary issues. The bulk of OMB's 500 employees are charged with monitoring the adherence of their assigned federal programs to presidential policies. OMB performs its coordination role by gathering, filtering, and promulgating the President's annual budget request, by issuing circulars dictating agency management practices, by overseeing the "President's Management Agenda",[1] and by reviewing agency regulations. The Office contains significant numbers of both career and politically appointed staff; OMB staff provide important continuity within the EOP since several hundred career professionals remain in their positions regardless of which party occupies the White House. Six positions within OMB — the director, the deputy director, the deputy director for management, and the administrators of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, and the Office of Federal Financial Management — are presidentially appointed and Senate-confirmed positions.

Jim Nussle was confirmed as Director of OMB on September 4, 2007, replacing Rob Portman.

The largest component of the Office of Management and Budget are the four Resource Management Offices which are organized along functional lines mirroring the U.S. federal government, each led by an OMB associate director. Approximately half of all OMB staff are assigned to these offices, the majority of whom are designated as program examiners. Program examiners can be assigned to monitor one or more federal agencies or may be assigned a topical area, such as monitoring issues relating to U.S. Navy warships. These staff have dual responsibility for both management and budgetary issues, as well as responsibility for giving expert advice on all aspects relating to their programs. Each year they review federal agency budget requests and help decide what resource requests will be sent to Congress as part of the president’s budget. They perform in-depth program evaluations using the Program Assessment Rating Tool,[2] review proposed regulations, agency testimony, analyze pending legislation, and oversee the aspects of the President's Management Agenda including agency management scorecards. They are often called upon to provide analysis information to any EOP staff member. They also provide important information to those assigned to the statutory offices within OMB, which are Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, the Office of Federal Financial Management, and the Office of E-Government whose job it is to specialize in issues such as federal regulations or procurement policy and law.

Other offices are OMB-wide support offices which include the Office of General Counsel, the Office of Legislative Affairs, the Budget Review Division (BRD), and the Legislative Reference Division. BRD performs government-wide budget coordination and is largely responsibly for the technical aspects relating to the release of the president’s budget each February. With respect to the estimation of spending for the executive branch, BRD serves a purpose parallel to that of the Congressional Budget Office for the estimation of spending for Congress, the Department of the Treasury for the estimation of revenues for the executive branch, and the Joint Committee on Taxation for the estimation of revenues for Congress.

The Legislative Reference Division has the important role of being the central clearinghouse across the federal government for proposed legislation or testimony by federal officials. It distributes proposed legislation and testimony to all relevant federal reviewers and distills the comments into a consensus opinion of the Administration about the proposal. They are also responsible for writing an Enrolled Bill Memorandum to the president once a bill is presented by both bodies of Congress for the president’s signature. The Enrolled Bill Memorandum details the particulars of the bill, opinions on the bill from relevant federal departments, and an overall opinion about whether the bill should be signed into law or vetoed. They also issues Statements of Administration Policy that let Congress know the White House’s official position on proposed legislation.

The Bureau of the Budget, OMB's predecessor, was established as a part of the Department of the Treasury by the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921. The Bureau of the Budget was moved to the EOP in 1939, and reorganized into OMB in 1970 during the Nixon administration. The first OMB included Roy Ash (head), Paul O'Neill (assistant director), Fred Malek (deputy director) and Frank Zarb (associate director) and two dozen others. In the 1990s, OMB was reorganized to remove the distinction between management staff and budgetary staff by combining those dual roles into each given program examiner within the Resource Management Offices.[3]

Source

• Ina Garten -- American author, and host of the Food Network program Barefoot Contessa.
• Joel Kaplan
• Lawrence Kudlow
• Sean O'Keefe -- later the administrator of NASA
• Jim Tozzi
• Robert Webb

• Office of Management and Budget - organization's web site
• Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs
• TheBudgetGraph.com a visual representation of the 2008 federal discretionary budget.
• "The Decision Makers: Office of Management and Budget" GovExec.com, August 22, 2005
• OMB Regulatory Officials By Administration
• History OMB Regulatory Review
• Office Of Management And Budget Meeting Notices and Rule Changes from The Federal Register RSS Feed
• Marc Robinson, More on IMF Annual Meetings Performance Budgeting Seminar - US Program Assessment Rating Tool, IMF PFM Blog, November 2007

v • d • e Agencies under the Executive Office of the President

White House Chief of Staff Deputy White House Chief of Staff White House Press Secretary • White House Counsel • White House Office of Presidential Communications • White House Office of Presidential Speechwriting • White House Office • White House Office of the Executive Clerk • Office of Management and Budget • National Security Council • Homeland Security Council • Office of the United States Trade Representative • Office of National Drug Control Policy • Council of Economic Advisers • Council on Environmental Quality • Domestic Policy Council • National Economic Council • Office of Administration • Office of Advance • Office of Scheduling • White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives • United States Office of National AIDS Policy • Office of Science and Technology Policy • President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board • President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board • USA Freedom Corps • White House Military Office