OMB and CBO

For those of you not into Federal alphabet soup - that's the Office of Management and Budget (part of the Executive Branch - i.e., works for President) and the Congressional Budget Office (part of the Legislative Branch, and set up to be non-partisan). This report (http://hotair.com/archives/2009/07/26/the-omb-cbo-throwdown/) of the OMB pressuring the CBO is really quite a serious thing. The (relative) independence of the CBO is critical to Congressional budgeting decisions - and, as a part of the Legislative Branch, the Executive Branch has little business even being at the meetings, much less "pressing his old CBO colleagues to change past practices".

This could lead to more of an "Imperial Presidency" than anything Bush or even Nixon did.