Fiscal Responsibility

Belle Sawhill - Page 1

Isabel Sawhill is a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution and regular panelist on Concord Coalition's Fiscal Wake-Up Tour. Her mother's name was also Isabel so as she grew up in the Washington, DC area family and friends called her Belle. Belle's years of experience in and around government make her well qualified to comment on the nation's fiscal crisis.

Belle was the executive director of a commission on employment policy under President Carter. "I later joined the Clinton administration as an associate director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB)." She held that job from 1993 to 1995. "It was fascinating. It was exhausting," recalls Belle. "It really gave me a bird's eye view of how government works. When you have the job that I had at OMB you oversee a very large part of the government. The way it's structured at OMB, you have the director but then the associate directors, of whom there are four or five, oversee a quarter or third or whatever of the government. My chunk was all of the social programs, Social Security, all of the Department of Education, all of the Department of Labor, all of the social programs in Health and Human Services. I had the Veterans Administration under my wing and a lot of smaller agencies. So it's a huge job and very interesting." Difficult as well. In her position she had to say no to many wonderful sounding programs because the money just wasn't there. "It is indeed a thankless job. In fact I always tell anyone who takes a job with OMB, you better buy a dog before you take the job because the only friend you'll have in Washington when you get out of government is that dog," she says laughing.

While two years at the OMB doesn't seem like much, there is a burnout factor to overseeing those budgets. "I had a third of the Federal budget under my jurisdiction," says Belle adding, "You never stop working. I used to carry two briefcases home on the weekend because I had so much reading to catch up on."

Belle was born and raised in the Washington, DC area and is the granddaughter of former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Willis Van Devanter, who served from 1909 to 1937. "He was conservative and when Roosevelt tried to pack the Supreme Court, you know increase the number of members in 1937, my grandfather was one of his targets. The conservative justices at that time were not supporting the President's New Deal legislation. So Roosevelt wanted to do something about that and he proposed an expansion of the size of the Supreme Court, which failed. My grandfather retired anyway around that time which gave Roosevelt the majority he wanted."

But Belle's father wanted nothing to do with politics. "My father was in the investment advising business and did that most of his life," says Belle. "He was quiet, had good values and was an outdoorsman. We used to go to Canada, to the Georgian Bay, which is part of Lake Huron. There are 30,000 islands in that area and my father had a small cottage on one of those islands. We would spend a lot of time there in the summer. He was very much into fishing, as am I."

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Article:
  Harry Zeeve: Page 1 - Page 2 - Page 3
  David Walker: Page 1 - Page 2
  Alison Acosta Fraser: Page 1 - Page 2 - Page 3
  Belle Sawhill: Page 1 - Page 2 - Page 3
  Chris Swann: Page 1 - Page 2 - Page 3
  Carl Tannenbaum: Page 1 - Page 2 - Page 3

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