Rob Nabors

I was saying this morning that I found it interesting that the economic team had been announced in such detail so early. Not just a Treasury Secretary, but all the way down to a Deputy OMB Director. Meanwhile, Stan Collender says we should pay more attention to the new Deputy OMB Director:

For those of you who don’t know him, Nabors is the staff director of the House Appropriations Committee. That means that, with Nabors, the president-elect will have someone who not only can do the line-by-line review he wants (that is, after all, what the appropriations committee staff does for a living every year), he has someone who knows where every appropriated dollar is and, most important, how it got there.

This is part of a trend toward Obama building an unusually Hill-ed up administration. That starts with a President and a Vice President who’ve both moved over directly from the Senate. It continues as you ad some key staffers from both of their Senate offices to the team, and with a Chief of Staff plucked from the House leadership. Then you have people who used to be key staffers for key legislators like Henry Waxman and Max Baucus, and now you can add Nabors to that trend. It’s kind of like an ersatz parliamentary system in which the cabinet is literally made up of the key legislative players.

Meanwhile, Collender has a pizza-related suggestion:

Matthew…How about we plan a series of Pizza Public Policy (P3?) get togethers with readers at some of the places around the country everyone has recommended where we can talk politics and pepperoni?

I think this has promise. Sort of like the Kennedy School’s Pizza and Politics seminars, except with better pizza.