Peter R. Orszag

His paternal great-grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Hungary who immigrated to New York City in 1903.

His father, Steven Orszag, was a math professor at Yale University and his mother was the president and owner of a research and development company.

His brother is Jonathan Orszag, the Senior Managing Director of Compass Lexecon, LLC.

Prior to that, he was the 37th Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) under President Barack Obama and had also served as the Director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

Orszag is a member of the National Academy of Medicine of the National Academies of Sciences.

He serves on the Boards of Directors of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the Mount Sinai Hospital, and New Visions for Public Schools in New York.

He has also been on the board of the Russell Sage Foundation.

Orszag grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, the son of Reba (née Karp) and Steven Orszag.

Peter Richard Orszag (born December 16, 1968) is an American business executive and former government official.

He is the Chief Executive Officer of Lazard.

Orszag was announced as Lazard’s incoming CEO on May 26, 2023.

He assumed the role on October 1, 2023, at which time he also became a Board Director.

After graduating from Phillips Exeter Academy with high honors (1987), Orszag earned an A.B. summa cum laude in economics from Princeton University in 1991 after completing an 80-page long senior thesis titled "Congressional Oversight of the Federal Reserve: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives."

He was a Marshall Scholar 1991–1992, and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

He then received a M.Sc. (1992) and a Ph.D. (1997) in economics from the London School of Economics.

His doctoral thesis was titled Dynamic analysis of regime shifts under uncertainty: Applications to hyperinflation and privatization.

He served as Special Assistant to the President for Economic Policy (1997–1998), and as Senior Economist and Senior Adviser on the Council of Economic Advisers (1995–1996) during the Clinton administration.

He also formed a consulting group called Sebago Associates, which merged into Competition Policy Associates and was bought by FTI Consulting Inc. for a reported $70 million.

After leaving the Obama administration, Orszag took a job with Citigroup.

Orszag became a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, and taught macroeconomics in 1999 and 2000.

As a senior fellow and Deputy Director of Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, he co-founded and directed The Hamilton Project and (in conjunction with Georgetown University's Public Policy Institute) the Pew Charitable Trust's Retirement Security Project.

Orszag was director of the Congressional Budget Office from January 2007 to November 2008.

During his tenure, he repeatedly drew attention to the role rising health care expenditures are likely to play in the government's long-term fiscal problems—and, by extension, the nation's long-term economic problems.

"I have not viewed CBO's job as just to passively evaluate what Congress proposes, but rather to be an analytical resource. And part of that is to highlight things that are true and that people may not want to hear, including that we need to address health-care costs."

During his time at the CBO, he added 20 full-time health analysts (bringing the total number to 50), thereby strengthening the CBO's analytical capabilities and preparing Congress for health-care reform.

He was widely praised for his time at CBO for preparing the agency for the debates to come.

When he stepped down, ''National Journal noted that "Orszag, who will turn 40 on Dec. 16, has been praised by lawmakers from both parties as an objective analyst with deep knowledge of the most pressing fiscal issues of the day, including health care policy, Social Security, pensions, and global climate change. He is the unusual economist who blends an understanding of politics, policy and communications in ways that wrap zesty quotes around complex ideas."

On November 25, 2008, President-elect Barack Obama announced that Orszag would be his nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget, the arm of the White House responsible for crafting the federal budget and overseeing the effectiveness of federal programs.

Orszag, in a November 2009 speech in New York, said that deficits, which were expected to add $9 trillion to the existing national debt of $12 trillion over the next decade, are "serious and ultimately unsustainable."

He said that deficit spending was necessary to help boost the economy when unemployment is hovering around 10 percent.

But he said that red ink must be stopped as the economy recovers.

He is also an invitee of the Bilderberg Group and attended the conferences in 2010, 2011 and 2012.

He has been a columnist at Bloomberg Opinion.

A 2011 article in New York Magazine suggested Citi's hiring of Orszag "signaled that Citi would be invested in the intellectual marketplace," and that "just about anyone will take the call of a former White House budget director."

Orszag joined Lazard as Vice Chairman of Investment Banking in May 2016.

Prior to Lazard, Orszag served as a Vice Chairman of Corporate and Investment Banking and Chairman of the Financial Strategy and Solutions Group at Citigroup.

Before joining Citigroup, he was a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a contributing columnist for the New York Times op-ed page.

In May 2016, Orszag joined Lazard as Managing Director and Vice Chairman of Investment Banking.

He was previously Head of North American Mergers & Acquisitions and Global Co-Head of Healthcare from July 2018 to June 2019.

Prior to becoming CEO, Orszag was Chief Executive Officer of Lazard's Financial Advisory from April 2019 to September 2023.