Technical Difficulties

I'm sorry about the delay in posting and getting to comments this morning--we've been migrating servers here at Atlantic Media, our parent company, and my access to this one was temporarily shut down.

And speaking of technical difficulties, Elizabeth Newell has information and thoughts on Nancy Killefer's withdrawal of her nomination to be the Chief Performance Officer:

Chief performance officer and Office of Management and Budget deputy director for management nominee Nancy Killefer has withdrawn her nomination, the White House confirmed on Tuesday. A spokesman refused to cite the reason for her withdrawal but said more information would be available later in the day.

President Obama named the former assistant Treasury secretary to the position on Jan. 7, touting Killefer as “uniquely qualified” to take on the task of eliminating poor-performing programs and streamlining effective ones.

When her selection was announced, The Associated Press reported that in 2005 the District of Columbia government had filed a more than $900 tax lien on Killefer’s home for failure to pay unemployment compensation tax on household help.

Other things to note:

This is very likely to delay other nominations at OMB, seems to me they would want to get the dep director for mngmnt in place before naming others. Also, Killefer was among the only names we heard being thrown around for the CPO position, do they have a backup? If they hadn’t also named her as OMB dep director for management, nomination wouldn’t have been required, would she still have withdrawn?