William G. Gale Named Director of Retirement Security Project

William G. Gale, currently Director of Economic Studies at the Retirement Security Project (RSP), will assume the position of Director beginning in January 2007, Peter R. Orszag, RSP's current Director, announced today. Gale takes over for Orszag, who is leaving RSP to serve as Director of the Congressional Budget Office pending approval by the incoming Senate President Pro Tempore and Speaker of the House.

Gale, who has been with RSP since its inception in 2005, also holds the Arjay and Frances Miller Chair in Federal Economic Policy in the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution. He is Director of the Economic Studies Program and Co-Director of the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute.

“Bill Gale has been an intellectual leader at RSP from the beginning,” Orszag said. “His previous work on retirement savings and tax issues is both substantial and greatly respected throughout the policy-making and academic worlds,” he added.

Gale's work includes research on a variety of economic issues, focusing particularly on pensions and saving behavior, tax policy and fiscal policy. Prior to joining Brookings in 1992, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Senior Staff Economist for the Council of Economic Advisers under President George H.W. Bush.

“I look forward to serving as RSP's Director, building on the project's progress in helping Americans save for their retirement by promoting Automatic 401(k)s and Automatic IRAs, improving the Saver's Credit and enabling taxpayers to directly deposit a portion of their federal tax refund into a retirement account,” Gale commented. “There is momentum in Washington for policy that makes retirement saving easier and more automatic. We will continue to work aggressively to promote common sense solutions,” he said.

About RSP: The goal of The Retirement Security Project is to work on a nonpartisan basis to make it easier and increase incentives for middle- and lower-income Americans to save for a financially secure retirement. RSP is dedicated to promoting common sense solutions to improve the retirement income prospects of millions of American workers. RSP publishes evidence-based policy briefs, policy and legislative analysis, discussion papers, original research, and working papers.

Pew is no longer active in this line of work, but for more information visit the Retirement Security Project on PewHealth.org.