The Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) is a
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country Continental United States, primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., ...
agency within the
Executive Office of the President established in 1946, which advises the
President of the United States
The president of the United States (POTUS) is the head of state and head of government of the United States of America. The president directs the Federal government of the United States#Executive branch, executive branch of the Federal gove ...
on economic policy. The CEA provides much of the empirical research for the
White House
The White House is the official residence and workplace of the president of the United States. It is located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., and has been the residence of every U.S. president since John Adams in ...
and prepares the publicly-available annual Economic Report of the President.
Activities
Economic Report of the President
The report is published by the CEA annually in February, no later than 10 days after the Budget of the US Government is submitted. The president typically writes a letter introducing the report, serving as an executive summary and used for press coverage. The report proceeds with several hundred pages of qualitative and quantitative research by reviewing the impact of
economic
An economy is an area of the production, distribution and trade, as well as consumption of goods and services. In general, it is defined as a social domain that emphasize the practices, discourses, and material expressions associated with th ...
activity in the previous year, outlining the economic goals for the coming year (based on the President's economic agenda), and making numerical projections of economic performance and outcomes. Public criticism usually accompanies its release, sometimes attacking the importance placed or not placed on particular data or goals. The data referenced or directly used in the report are from the
Bureau of Economic Analysis and U.S.
Bureau of Labor Statistics
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is a unit of the United States Department of Labor. It is the principal fact-finding agency for the U.S. government in the broad field of labor economics and statistics and serves as a principal agency of ...
.
History
Establishment
The Truman administration established the Council of Economic Advisers via the
Employment Act of 1946
The Employment Act of 1946 ch. 33, section 2, 60 Stat. 23, codified as , is a United States federal law. Its main purpose was to lay the responsibility of economic stability of inflation and unemployment onto the federal government. The Act stated: ...
to provide presidents with objective economic analysis and advice on the development and implementation of a wide range of domestic and international economic policy issues. It was a step from an "ad hoc style of economic policy-making to a more institutionalized and focused process". The act gave the council the following goals:
In 1949 Chairman
Edwin Nourse and member
Leon Keyserling
Leon Hirsch Keyserling (January 11, 1908 – August 9, 1987) was an American economist and lawyer who served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from 1950 to 1953. During his tenure, he advised President Harry S. Truman on the economi ...
argued about whether the advice should be private or public and about the role of government in economic stabilization.
[Remarks by Chairman Alan Greenspan. Receipt of the Truman Medal for Economic Policy. Before the Truman Medal Award and Economics Conference, Kansas City, Missouri]
October 26, 2005, Council of Economic Advisers website under President Bush Nourse believed a choice had to be made between "
guns or butter" but Keyserling argued for deficit spending, asserting that an expanding economy could afford large defense expenditures without sacrificing an increased standard of living. In 1949, Keyserling gained support from Truman advisors
Dean Acheson
Dean Gooderham Acheson (pronounced ; April 11, 1893October 12, 1971) was an American statesman and lawyer. As the 51st U.S. Secretary of State, he set the foreign policy of the Harry S. Truman administration from 1949 to 1953. He was also Truma ...
and
Clark Clifford. Nourse resigned as chairman, warning about the dangers of budget deficits and increased funding of "wasteful" defense costs. Keyserling succeeded to the chairmanship and influenced Truman's
Fair Deal
The Fair Deal was a set of proposals put forward by U.S. President Harry S. Truman to Congress in 1945 and in his January 1949 State of the Union address. More generally. the term characterizes the entire domestic agenda of the Truman administr ...
proposals and the economic sections of
NSC 68 United States Objectives and Programs for National Security, better known as NSC68, was a 66-page top secret National Security Council (NSC) policy paper drafted by the Department of State and Department of Defense and presented to President Har ...
that, in April 1950, asserted that the larger armed forces America needed would not affect living standards or risk the "transformation of the free character of our economy."
1950s–80s
During the
1953–54 recession, the CEA, headed by
Arthur Burns deployed non-traditional
neo-keynesian interventions, which provided results later called the "steady fifties" wherein many families stayed in the economic "middle class" with just one family wage-earner. The Eisenhower Administration supported an activist contracyclical approach that helped to establish
Keynesianism as a possible bipartisan economic policy for the nation. Especially important in formulating the CEA response to the recession—accelerating
public works programs, easing credit, and reducing taxes—were Arthur F. Burns and
Neil H. Jacoby.
Until 1963, during its first seven years the CEA made five technical advances in policy making, including the replacement of a "cyclical model" of the economy by a "growth model," the setting of quantitative targets for the economy, use of the theories of fiscal drag and full-employment budget, recognition of the need for greater flexibility in taxation, and replacement of the notion of unemployment as a structural problem by a realization of a low aggregate demand.
The 1978
Humphrey–Hawkins Full Employment Act
The Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act (known informally as the Humphrey–Hawkins Full Employment Act) is an act of legislation by the United States government.
Impetus and strategy
Unemployment and inflation levels began to rise in the ...
required each administration to move toward
full employment
Full employment is a situation in which there is no cyclical or deficient-demand unemployment. Full employment does not entail the disappearance of all unemployment, as other kinds of unemployment, namely structural and frictional, may remain. F ...
and reasonable price stability within a specific time period. It has been criticized for making CEA's annual economic report highly political in nature, as well as highly unreliable and inaccurate over the standard two or five year projection periods.
1980–present
Since 1980, the CEA has focused on sources of economic growth, the supply side of the economy, and on international issues.
[ In the wake of the Great Recession of 2008–2009, the Council of Economic Advisers played a significant role in supporting the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.]
Organization
The council's chairman is nominated by the president and confirmed by the United States Senate
The United States Senate is the upper chamber of the United States Congress, with the House of Representatives being the lower chamber. Together they compose the national bicameral legislature of the United States.
The composition and po ...
. The members are appointed by the president. As of July 2017, the Council's 18 person staff consisted of a chief of staff (Director of Macroeconomic Forecasting), 15 economists (5 senior, 4 research, 4 staff economists, 2 economic statisticians) and 2 operations staff.Council of Economic Advisers. Staff
Whitehouse.gov, n.d. accessed 29 July 2017 Many of the staff economists are academics on leave or government economists on temporary assignment from other agencies.
Composition
Chairs
Members
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John D. Clark 1946–1953
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Roy Blough 1950–1952
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Leon Keyserling
Leon Hirsch Keyserling (January 11, 1908 – August 9, 1987) was an American economist and lawyer who served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from 1950 to 1953. During his tenure, he advised President Harry S. Truman on the economi ...
1950–1953
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Robert C. Turner 1952–1953
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Karl A. Fox
Karl August Fox (July 14, 1917 – April 20, 2008) was an American economist. He was a professor of economics at Iowa State University from 1955 to 1987. During 1954–55, he was senior staff economist with the President’s Council of Economic ...
1953–1955
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Neil H. Jacoby 1953–1955
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Asher Achinstein 1954–1956
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Walter W. Stewart 1953–1955
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Joseph S. Davis
Joseph Stancliffe Davis (November 5, 1885 – April 23, 1975) was an American economist. He was a professor of economics at Stanford University and a long-time director of the newly established Food Research Institute. In 1944, he served as pre ...
1955–1958
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Paul W. McCracken 1956–1959
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Karl Brandt 1958–1961
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Henry C. Wallich 1959–1961
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James Tobin
James Tobin (March 5, 1918 – March 11, 2002) was an American economist who served on the Council of Economic Advisers and consulted with the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and taught at Harvard and Yale Universities. He ...
1961–1962
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Kermit Gordon
Kermit Gordon (July 3, 1916 – June 21, 1976) was Director of the United States Bureau of the Budget (now the Office of Management and Budget) (December 28, 1962 – June 1, 1965) during the administration of John F. Kennedy. He continued to serv ...
1961–1962
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John P. Lewis 1963–1964
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Otto Eckstein
Otto Eckstein (August 1, 1927 – March 22, 1984) was a German-American economist. He was a key developer and proponent of the theory of core inflation , which proposed that in determining accurate metrics of long run inflation, the transitory pri ...
1964–1966
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James S. Duesenberry 1966–1968
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Merton J. Peck 1968–1969
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Warren L. Smith 1968–1969
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Hendrik S. Houthakker
Hendrik Samuel Houthakker (December 31, 1924 – April 15, 2008) was a prominent American economist.
Life and career
Houthakker was born in Amsterdam to a Dutch-Jewish family. His father was a prominent art dealer. As a teenager he lived th ...
1969–1971
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Herbert Stein 1969–1971
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Ezra Solomon 1971–1973
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Marina von Neumann Whitman 1972–1973
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Gary L. Seevers 1973–1975
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William J. Fellner
William John Fellner (born ''Fellner Vilmos'' on May 31, 1905 – September 15, 1983) was a Hungarian-American economist and Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University from 1952 until his retirement in 1973. Born in Budapest, Austria-Hu ...
1973–1975
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Paul. W. MacAvoy 1975–1976
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Burton G. Malkiel 1975–1977
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William D. Nordhaus
William Dawbney Nordhaus (born May 31, 1941) is an American economist, a Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University, best known for his work in economic modeling and climate change, and one of the 2 recipients of the 2018 Nobel Memori ...
1977–1979
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Lyle E. Gramley 1977–1980
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George C. Eads 1979–1981
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Stephen Goldfeld 1980–1981
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William A. Niskanen 1981–1985
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Jerry L. Jordan 1981–1982
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William Poole
William Poole (July 24, 1821 – March 8, 1855), also known as Bill the Butcher, was the leader of the Washington Street Gang, which later became known as the Bowery Boys gang. He was a local leader of the Know Nothing political movement ...
1982–1985
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Thomas Gale Moore 1985–1989
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Michael L. Mussa 1986–1988
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John B. Taylor 1989–1991
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Richard L. Schmalensee 1989–1991
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David F. Bradford 1991–1993
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Paul Wonnacott 1991–1993
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Alan S. Blinder 1993–1994
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Carolyn Fischer
Carolyn Fischer is an environmental economist. She was born in Ontario, later moving to the United States. She is a senior fellow for Resources for the Future, as well as being a Canada 150 Research Chair in Climate Economics, Innovation, and Po ...
1994-1995
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Joseph Stiglitz 1993–1995
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Martin N. Baily 1995–1996
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Alicia H. Munnell 1996–1997
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Jeffrey A. Frankel 1997–1999
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Rebecca M. Blank
Rebecca, ; Syriac: , ) from the Hebrew (lit., 'connection'), from Semitic root , 'to tie, couple or join', 'to secure', or 'to snare') () appears in the Hebrew Bible as the wife of Isaac and the mother of Jacob and Esau. According to biblical ...
1998–1999
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Yu-Chin Chen
Yu-Chin Chen is an economist and researcher at the University of Washington. Her research fields include international finance, macroeconomics, open economy macroeconomics, trade and development, and applied economics. She has served as a staff ...
1999–2000
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Robert Z. Lawrence 1999–2001
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Kathryn L. Shaw 2000–2001
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Mark B. McClellan 2001–2002
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Randall S. Kroszner 2001–2003
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Kristin J. Forbes 2003–2005
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Harvey S. Rosen 2003–2005
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Katherine Baicker 2005–2007
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Matthew J. Slaughter 2005–2007
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Donald B. Marron Jr.
Donald Baird Marron Jr. is an American economist, professor and policy advisor and director of the nonpartisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center in Washington, D.C. He is the son of the economist and financier Donald B. Marron Sr.
Career
Marr ...
2008–2009
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Cecilia Rouse 2009–2011
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Carl Shapiro 2011–2012
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Katharine Abraham
Katharine G. Abraham (born August 28, 1954) is an American economist who is the director of the Maryland Center for Economics and Policy, and a professor of survey methodology and economics at the University of Maryland. She was commissioner o ...
2011–2013
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James H. Stock 2013–2014
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Betsey Stevenson
Betsey Ayer Stevenson (born c. 1971) is an economist and Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Michigan Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. Additionally, she is a fellow of the Ifo Institute for Economic Research in Mun ...
2013–2015
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Maurice Obstfeld 2014–2015
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Jay Shambaugh 2015–2017
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Sandra Black 2015–2017
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Richard Burkhauser 2017–2019
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Tomas J. Philipson 2017–2020
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Tyler Goodspeed
Tyler Beck Goodspeed (born 1984/1985) is an American economist and economic historian who was the acting chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from June 2020 to January 2021. He resigned from his position on January 7, in the wake of the 20 ...
2019–2021
*
Heather Boushey
Heather Marie BousheyThe New York Times''Weddings/Celebrations; Heather Boushey, Todd Tucker'' accessed August 25, 2011. (born 1970) is an American economist. Boushey currently serves as a member of President Joe Biden's Council of Economic Adv ...
2021–present
*
Jared Bernstein 2021–present
References
Sources
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External links
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List of recent reports by the Council of Economic Advisors*
ttp://eisenhower.archives.gov/Research/Finding_Aids/B.html Papers of Arthur F. Burns, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential LibraryPapers of Raymond J. Saulnier, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library*Economic Report of the President:
Economic Report of the PresidentWhite House
Economic Reports 1947 to presenton
FRASER, St. Louis Federal Reserve
U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA)US Gvt
U.S. Bureau of Labor StatisticsEconomic Report of the President (1995–present)United States Government Publishing Office
{{Authority control
Executive Office of the President of the United States
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United States economic policy
United States national commissions
1946 establishments in the United States
Government agencies established in 1946