Orszag Insists He's No Peacock

I asked Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag this afternoon about criticism from the left of President Obama's proposed spending freeze.

Specifically, I asked his reaction to Brian's report about the Center for American Progress suggesting that discretionary spending freezes were used by "deficit peacocks."

CAP's tax and budget expert Michael Linden suggested that those who "claim that we could get the budget back to sustainability if we only cut out earmarks, or say that the solution is to simply freeze discretionary spending, are just peddling fiscal snake oil."

"I don't know that I would describe it quite that way," Orszag told me.

He defended the Obama freeze proposal as one tool, and said if it existed in a vacuum it wouldn't be sufficient. But that's why the administration has found $1.2 trillion in savings, the freeze is "only one step," he said.

Orszag was speaking to reporters about the Obama administration's new budget blueprint revealed today.