Mitch Daniels

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Mitch Daniels : biography

07 April 1949 –

Office of Management and Budget

In January 2001, Daniels accepted President George W. Bush’s invitation to serve as director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). He served as Director from January 2001 through June 2003. In this role he was also a member of the National Security Council and the Homeland Security Council.

During his time as the director of the OMB, Bush referred to him as "the Blade," for his noted acumen at budget cutting. The $2.13 trillion budget Daniels submitted to Congress in 2001 would have made deep cuts in many agencies to accommodate the tax cuts being made, but few of the spending cuts were actually approved by Congress. During Daniels’ 29-month tenure in the position, the projected federal budget surplus of $236 billion declined to a $400 billion deficit, due to an economic downturn, and failure to enact spending cuts to offset the tax reductions.

Shortly after the invasion of Afghanistan, Daniels gave a speech to the National Press Club in which he challenged the view of those who wanted to continue typical spending while the nation was at war. “The idea of reallocating assets from less important to more important things, especially in a time of genuine emergency, makes common sense and is applied everywhere else in life,” he said., Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr., Remarks to The National Press Club, 11/28/2001.

Conservative columnist Ross Douthat stated in a column about Daniels time at OMB that Daniels "carried water, as director of the Office of Management and Budget, for some of the Bush administration’s more egregious budgets.", Douthat, Ross But Douthat, while calling Daniels “America’s Best Governor,” defended Daniels against accusations that Daniels inaccurately assessed the costs of the Iraq war. Operation Iraqi Freedom.

In the final days of 2002, when an invasion of Iraq was still a hypothetical question, Daniels told the New York Times that the cost of war with Iraq “could be” in the range of $50 to $60 billion. It was not clear whether Daniels was referring to the cost of a short invasion or a longer war, but he did indicate the administration was budgeting for both. He also described the “back-of-the-envelope” estimate by Bush Economic Advisor Lawrence B. Lindsey that it would cost $100 to $200 billion as much too high. Two days later, after the New Years Holiday, an OMB spokesperson clarified Daniels’ remarks, adding that the $50 to $60 billion figure was not a hard White House estimate and “it is impossible to know what any military campaign would ultimately cost. The only cost estimate we know of in this arena is the Persian Gulf War and that was a $60 billion event.

Three months later, on March 25, 2003, five days after the start of the invasion, President Bush requested $53 billion through an emergency supplemental appropriation to cover operational expenses in Iraq until September 30 of that year., March 25, 2003, Los Angeles Times. The total request was for $75 billion but only $53 billion went to Iraq operations. "The spending measure would cover these expenses to the end of this fiscal year — Sept. 30 — according to a senior administration official who briefed reporters Monday." According to the Congressional Budget Office, Military operations in Iraq for 2003 cost $46 Billion, less than the amount projected by Daniels and OMB., October 24, 2007, Table 2, Pg. 4, in the 2003 column Douthat and other Daniel’s defenders accuse Daniels’ critics of mischaracterizing the six-month supplemental appropriation as a request to fund the entire war.

Between September 2001 and October 2012, lawmakers appropriated about $1.4 trillion for operations in both the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.