Josh Porter ’11

Josh Porter ’11 spent his summer interning in the White House with the Council of Economic Advisers, an agency within the Executive Office of the President charged with offering the President objective economic advice on the formulation of both domestic and international economic policy. Josh worked under Christina Romer, Austan Goolsbee and Cecilia Rouse running regression models, providing research and studying economic data to support President Obama in setting US economic policy. Throughout the summer, Josh spent a majority of his time helping with financial regulation and the economic recovery act.

<< Read About More Students

Journal #1

Today is my sixth week on the job at the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and today’s events mark the perfect time to stop and reflect upon the experience.

My past few weeks (and weekends) have been spent — among other tasks — helping the staff research, draft, proofread, and fact-check the Fourth Quarterly Report of The Economic Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. As part of the accountability provisions in the Recovery Act, the Council of Economic Advisers has a mandate to report to Congress the quarterly progress of the effects of the Recovery Act on, “overall economic activity, and on employment in particular.” The report we have been working on is for the second quarter of 2010. More specifically, I assisted one of our labor economists in the section on recipient reporting, which asked prime recipients of Recovery Act funds to identify jobs funded by the Recovery Act. The entire 51-page report can be found online, so I won’t bore you with the details, but one of the more optimistic findings (in my humble opinion) is how Recovery Act funds are attracting private investment. All told, we estimate that every dollar of Recovery Act funds is being matched by $3 in private investment. Regardless of which side of the aisle you sit on, this is encouraging news.

At around 10:30 a.m. I, along with a few of the staff economists, headed to the South Court Auditorium in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building where Chairwoman Romer introduced the results of the report with Vice President Biden to the press. After an hour-long presentation (where Ms. Romer kindly thanked us interns for our help and hard work), we headed over to the Dirksen Senate Office Building for a quick lunch, and then sat with the Chairwoman as she testified before the Joint Economic Committee in a hearing on the economic outlook.

Following the three-hour hearing, it was back to the White House for a brief staff meeting to discuss the hearing, then back to my desk to continue working on a PowerPoint deck on the economic impact on the Gulf states from the BP oil spill.