When Bill Daley was relieved of the Chief of Staff part of the Chief of Staff job, I thought he’d just end up as an appendage, a corporate bagman. But over the past several weeks, the White House has stepped away from the corporate-friendly pose they cultivated with the Daley appointment, and Daley became far less relevant. Today he resigned to join the reelection campaign.

There are several ways in which the Defense Department’s extended whine about automatic sequestration cuts to their base budget is a joke, but the White House has apparently sniffed out one of those ways. The Overseas Contingency budget has quickly become a slush fund for the Pentagon. Many earmarked to go toward operations in Iraq and Afghanistan often ends up paying for cherished Pentagon programs. The White House wants to put a stop to this.

The White House Office of Management and Budget recently published its Mid-Session Review based on the most recent economic data. The MSR shows OMB’s economic growth outlook moving steadily downward from the earlier February report, and the numbers are a red flag for the economy and the President’s re-election.

Last night the Senate rejected an attempt to repeal the health care reform law. However, what they did repeal — and more important, how they paid for it — provides a signal for how the deficit debate will go on Capitol Hill. And it’s not a particularly good signal.

If a memo instituting new security reviews, explicitly written in response to WikiLeaks, institutes a policy of reviewing contacts with the media, doesn’t that suggest they consider WikiLeaks to be media?

Former OMB Director Peter Orszag gives us an absurd argument for why we should extend Bush tax cuts for the richest two percent of Americans for another two years but end the Bush tax cuts for everyone by 2013. To get there, Orszag has to ignore both economics and fairness and use logic and political arguments only when convenient.

The New York Times cites an anonymous source saying that Peter Orszag will step down as the head of the Office of Management and Budget.

In March, Obama ordered all executive branch agencies and departments to study their use of outside contractors. Wonder of wonders . . . they’ve found that in many cases, government workers actually do a better job for the money. IRS collections are better, and now the DOD is getting in on the act.

I’m sure the GOP deficit hawks will be cheering this news, despite the fact that it reverses the eight years of BushCo shoveling money out the door that they enabled and encouraged.

The good folks at Center For Progressive Reform recently released their report on the issues surrounding Cass Sunstein, Obama’s pick for OIRA – the part of OMB with the power to kill off health, food, enviro, and any other regulation intended to protect us and the living world we depend upon.

What does the Office of Management and Budget have to do with our health and our environment? Well, the OMB effectively has the last word on the regulations Federal agencies write to implement Federal Law. For decades, OMB’s been where proposed Federal rules to keep poison out of our lives meet lethal doses of deregulation.