Former Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf has been named the new dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Public Policy, a representative for the school confirmed Thursday.
Elmendorf will take over at the Kennedy School in January. The current dean, David Ellwood, is stepping down this year.
“During my public service, I have seen firsthand the essential role of innovative policy ideas and outstanding people to put those ideas into practice, and the Harvard Kennedy School is the pre-eminent provider of both to governments in this country and around the world,” Elmendorf said in a statement from the school.
He left the budget office in March, after leading it since 2009.
In that time, the Harvard-trained economist was responsible for estimating the budgetary costs of President Obama’s major legislative initiatives, including the 2010 healthcare law now known as Obamacare.
He is respected by many policy experts on both the Right and Left as an honest broker, although some Republicans criticized the office under his management for its scoring of Obamacare as reducing the deficit.
A Democratic appointee, Elmendorf was replaced this year by Keith Hall, an economist selected by the Republican majorities in Congress.
The Congressional Budget Office is Congress’ nonpartisan, in-house budget think tank. It provides estimates of costs of legislation for lawmakers, as well as budgetary and economic projections and studies on fiscal topics.
Before the budget office, Elmendorf worked at the Brookings Institution think tank, the Federal Reserve and the Clinton Treasury Department. He is married to Karen Dynan, the assistant secretary for Economic Policy and chief economist for the Treasury Department.
