With less than a week before the President's budget comes out The Wall Street Journal has reported that it will be similar to the September submission to the Super Committee.

Jeff Zients will once again ascend to the role of acting OMB director, according to a blog post on OMB's website. Zients had previously stepped into that role in 2010 during the gap between Peter Orszag's and Jacob Lew's tenures as director. Otherwise, he has been serving in the roles of Deputy Director of Management and Chief Performance Officer for nearly three years.

The most recent focus of President Obama's initiatives has been on "insourcing," or providing incentives to companies to bring jobs back to the US from overseas. According to CNN's article, the proposal, which will come in a few weeks and surely be included in the President's budget, will work on both sides of the equation: providing incentives to companies who bring business back home and eliminating incentives for companies that do the opposite.

You may have already read the news yesterday, but current OMB director Jack Lew will be replacing Bill Daley as President Obama's chief of staff at the end of January.

After hinting at how they would cut defense spending yesterday, the Obama Administration has given out another small detail of its upcoming budget. According to the Washington Post's Ed O' Keefe, the White House will request a 0.5 percent pay increase for federal employees in FY 2013, on the heels of a two-year pay freeze.

Yesterday evening, President Obama addressed a Joint Session of Congress to propose his newest economic recovery measure -- The American Jobs Act. The President's bill would have a $447 billion ten-year cost, which the President says would be fully paid for in the proposal he will give to the Super Committee a week from Monday recommending the Committee exceed its $1.5 trillion mandate.

Back in February, we dinged the President's budget for relying on overly optimistic economic assumptions in 2012 and beyond. CBO's Analysis of the President's budget showed much higher deficits, in part because they used different assumptions about economic growth and employment.

Under the Administration's Mid-Session Review, the gap between spending and revenues is set to persist throughout the decade with barely any change in that gap, even if potentially $1.5 trillion in savings from the Super Committee materializes. Also noteworthy is that both spending and revenues will exceed their historical averages over the past few decades of about 21 percent of GDP for spending and about 18 percent of GDP for revenues.

OMB has just released its Mid-Session Review, incorporating the effects of the Budget Control Act and the Super Committee's target savings into its projections. The MSR shows significant improvement compared to the President's Budget, although deficits obviously are higher than under CBO's current law estimates.

On OMB's blog, OMB director Jack Lew talked about his instructions to agencies to cut 5 percent off their 2011 budget for their FY 2013 request. In addition, they are instructed to list additional savings that would result in a 10 percent cut.