Peter Orszag: Making nerdy sexy

Peter Orszag is the youngest member of President Obama's team holding cabinet rank, a 40-year-old with what colleagues call a graybeard's knowledge of how the government spends money. But he has little interest in merely keeping fiscal house. His animating passions are far grander — health care, energy policy and Social Security overhaul, for starters. Everything about the way he has interpreted his new job speaks of ambition: the policy heavyweights he has hired for the Office of Management and Budget, his efforts to persuade cabinet secretaries to let him help shape their plans, a public profile as high as that of any budget director since David A. Stockman's polarizing tenure under Ronald Reagan a quarter-century ago. But though colleagues call Mr. Orszag something of a presidential favorite, his relative power among the gigantic personalities on the Obama economic team is still uncertain. Although the budget touches everything, he has no particular subject-area portfolio, and on the topics that most draw his interest, the administration is already well stocked, maybe even overstocked, with expertise and opinions.