Vice President Joe Biden will nominate on Monday Katrina Coloretti and Shalanda Young to lead the Office of Management and Budget, in a bid to restore confidence in the nation’s chief financial officer and reorganize the department in a strategic way.
Coloretti, who has served as OMB’s acting chief for nearly two years, would fill the department’s top job with an insider’s knowledge of fiscal management issues and Washington life. She will replace acting CFO Mike Nussbaum, who has been nominated to lead the Federal Reserve.
Young, who has served as OMB’s deputy assistant to the president, for domestic policy and national security, will reorganize OMB into a “comprehensive budget and financial management office.”
Young helped build a former $3.5 billion budget office under President George W. Bush into a “true collaborative agency that clearly understands the needs of other agencies,” Senator Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, said on Monday.
At a news conference, Biden said the changes are necessary to “create a modernized OMB that is responsive to a president who understands the complexity of the modern America and the complex interconnectedness of the 21st century American economy.”
Biden, who told a G-20 conference earlier this month that the Obama administration will remain in a “deficit mindset” to deliver a middle-class, domestic policy agenda, said the changes are aimed at letting the country focus on the nation’s budget troubles rather than the “absurd attempt” to fight climate change.
“We can’t start fighting climate change through our accounting,” he said.