Now that Republicans in the House are in charge of the appropriations process, Senate Republicans have hired a Bush-era specialist to guarantee anti-regulatory budgets. Congress is under a tight deadline to fund the government, as the budget continuation passed in the lame duck session expires March 4. House Republicans are relying on a passel of corporate lobbyists to set the agenda, and now Senate Budget Committee ranking member Jeff Sessions (R-AL) has hired former George W. Bush official Marcus Peacock as the Republican staff director, Politico’s Darren Samuelsohn reports.

Marcus C. Peacock was a top official at both the Bush OMB and EPA. From 2001 until August 2005, he served as the Associate Director for Natural Resources, Energy and Science at the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) under John Graham. While at OMB, Peacock created the Performance Assessment Rating Tool (PART), a complex assessment system by which the OMB exerts authority over every action of executive branch agencies. PART was one of several tools used to centralize and politicize the executive branch under White House control during the Bush presidency.

Peacock then became the EPA’s “regulatory policy officer,” a position created in January 2007 by executive order to be the liaison between EPA and OIRA for regulatory reviews and discussions. “Graham henchman” Peacock tried to shutter EPA’s library system, politicized the air-quality-standard process, and appeared to have been involved in the firing of Region V Administrator Mary Gade over a dispute with Dow Chemical.

Peacock also served in the OMB during the first Bush administration during the 1980s, and was top staffer for Bud Shuster (R-PA) in the Transportation Committee before joining George W. Bush administration.

Peacock now oversees the Pew Charitable Trusts initiative Subsidyscope — a comprehensive analysis of federal spending. In December, Peacock was appointed by Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) to the Commission on Key National Indicators.

In the wake of President Obama’s fiscal commission releasing a report that aimed to put Social Security into long-term balance by, among other things, raising the retirement age, a whole host of lawmakers have jumped onto that particular bandwagon. “If we do not do something to extend the retirement age…you’re not going to have this program,” said Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), while Sen. Kent Conrad called for implementing the fiscal commission’s Social Security plan in an op-ed today.

The latest to advocate such a change is Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels (R). During an interview with the New York Times’ David Leonhardt, Daniels claimed that raising the retirement age makes sense because people will eventually live to be 100 years old by “replacing body parts like we do tires”:

Clearly, means testing. Clearly, retirement age, over time. What you’re saying to these younger people is –- who, by the way, I think, barring disasters, are going to live to possibly old ages, as we have always thought of it…They will live to be more than 100, because, again, barring accidents or something, or war, well over. They should. They’ll be replacing body parts like we do tires. If you ask a young person who’s paying any attention to this, “How old do you expect to be, and how long would you like to be a vital working person?” they’re not going to find this offensive. Thirty years from now, you might work at 68, 70, 72….

Aside from the obvious folly of raising the retirement age now in anticipation of human body-part replacement technology that may or may not exist at some undetermined point in the future, Daniels is basing his policy preference on the same faulty understanding of American life expectancy espoused by loads of would-be Social Security reformers.

While average life expectancy has indeed been rising, it is largely as a result of increases among upper income earners working in white-collar jobs. Middle- and low-income workers have not seen the same increases and would be disproportionately affected if the retirement age were raised. As the Center for Economic and Policy Research put it, “there has been a sharp rise in inequality in life expectancy by income over the last three decades that mirrors the growth in inequality in income”:

If the normal retirement age is increased to age 70 over the next 25 years, as advocated by many policymakers, then the rise in the retirement age will continue to offset most of the increase in life expectancy. In the event that trends in inequality continue, then workers in the bottom half of the wage distribution will see a decline in the expected length of their retirement. For these workers, in the higher retirement age scenario, the expected years of retirement will be less for the 1973 birth cohort than it was for the 1912 birth cohort.

Daniels has a reputation as a reasonable conservative, and he is willing to at least inhabit reality when it comes to things like tax policy. But his version of Social Security reform entails a regressive change that hurts those most dependent on the program. Here’s a progressive vision for modernizing Social Security that does not rely on the blunt instrument of raising the retirement age.

House Republicans made a lot of noise in their pre-election “Pledge to America” regarding exactly how much government spending they were going to cut. At the document’s unveling, incoming Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) confidently asserted “we can save $100 billion dollars a year. That’s $1 trillion over the next ten years.”

And Boehner was far from the only one laying out $100 billion in non-defense discretionary spending cuts as the benchmark. Incoming House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) said that the GOP’s goal was to cut “a good $100 billion.” Rep. Kevin McCarthy (of “Young Gun” fame) reiterated the promise, saying, “We’re saying you go through, go back to pre-stimulus bailout numbers. We can live with that.” “We’ve got to roll back there. That will save $100 billion in the first year,” agreed Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN).

Just yesterday, in fact, incoming Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) repeated that the GOP is aiming for $100 billion in cuts. However, according to the New York Times, this promise was not a promise in the literal sense:

Now aides say that the $100 billion figure was hypothetical, and that the objective is to get annual spending for programs other than those for the military, veterans and domestic security back to the levels of 2008, before Democrats approved stimulus spending to end the recession.

“I think they woke up to the reality that this will have a direct negative impact on people’s lives,” said Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), who will be the ranking member on the House Budget Committee. “You know, it’s easy to talk about these things in the abstract. It’s another thing when you start taking away people’s college loans and Pell Grants or cutting early education programs.”

Indeed, since the contractionary effects of $100 billion in spending cuts, and the layoffs that would follow, would do real damage to the economy, the fact that the GOP is backing away from its commitment is a good thing. But it’s just the latest in a flurry of budget promises that the GOP has broken, before it even officially came into power:

– After campaigning for more transparency and fewer backroom deals, House Republicans unveiled a rule allowing Ryan to implement spending levels without ever having them voted upon.

– After campaigning heavily against the deficit and government spending, the first bill that House Republicans intend to hold a vote on — repeal of the Affordable Care Act — would increase the deficit.

– Another rule that the House GOP proposed would allow lawmakers to reallocate spending cuts, rather than use them to pay down the deficit. Some conservative lawmakers have rebelled, calling this “Washington-style gimmicks” to increase spending.

This morning, Ryan said on NBC’s Today Show that, while spending will be reduced, he doesn’t know by how much. “I can’t tell you by what amount…but it will all be coming down,” he said.