MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is All Things Considered. I'm Michele Norris. Today is President-elect Barack Obama's first full day in Washington, D.C. He sent his daughters off to their first day of school and then got going with his own work. He made some long-awaited nominations for intelligence positions, and he urged members of Congress to approve a huge economic stimulus plan.
President-elect BARACK OBAMA: It's clear that we have to act and we have to act now to address this crisis and break the momentum of the recession or the next few years could be dramatically worse.
NORRIS: NPR's Scott Horsley spent the day following the president-elect, and he joins us now. Hello, Scott.
SCOTT HORSLEY: Good to be with you, Michele.
NORRIS: Let's start with the news that broke this afternoon. Mr. Obama has named a head of the CIA and a national intelligence director. What can you tell us about these two men?
HORSLEY: Well, Dennis Blair, the choice for national intelligence director, was a career Navy man. He retired after serving last as commander in chief of U.S. forces in the Pacific. He also held positions in the CIA and with the National Security Council. Leon Panetta, though, the choice to head the CIA itself, is perhaps a less conventional choice. He is a veteran of the Clinton White House, we know. He served as a budget director and later chief of staff. But he didn't play a big public role in intelligence there or in his earlier life as a California congressman.
He did, however, have an intelligence background from his early days in the military. And news of these intelligence picks comes on a day when the president-elect was devoting most of his time to the economy. But he repeated today what he said before, that a president or a president-elect has to be able to do more than one thing at a time.
NORRIS: Well, let's talk about his economic agenda. President-elect Obama met with leaders in Congress. He also met today with key members of his economic team. What did he have to say about those closed-door meetings?
HORSLEY: Well, he said that there is a great deal of urgency, that the economic news is getting worse. He warned of a dire jobs report that may come out at the end of this week. He says Congress has to act quickly and boldly to pass a massive stimulus package. He spent much of his day meeting with his economic team and with leaders on Capitol Hill trying to build, really, bipartisan support for that measure, which is expected to cost the federal government something like three-quarters of a trillion dollars.
NORRIS: Now he seemed to warn that the economy is not just bad, but getting worse, and he's urging Congress to act fast. But it sounds like this economic stimulus measure may not be ready quite as early as he had hoped.
HORSLEY: That's right. Democrats originally wanted to have a stimulus bill ready for the new president's signature almost the moment he took office. Now, Mr. Obama's advisers and some top lawmakers say that's very unlikely. Instead they're talking about aiming for the end of January, maybe early February. House Speaker Pelosi said today she expects a spirited debate over the package. But the president-elect says he won't let the bill get bogged down in partisan bickering. And if we are talking about late January, early February, Mr. Obama himself may play a bigger role in negotiating the package, not as president-elect, but sitting in the Oval Office.
NORRIS: Well, in terms of negotiating, one way of reaching out perhaps to Republicans is to put some of the stimulus in the form of tax cuts in addition to new government spending. That likely to happen?
HORSLEY: That's right. The Obama team let it be known over the weekend that they are prepared to devote a significant portion of the stimulus package to tax cuts, both for workers and for businesses. That would be on top of the hundreds of billions of dollars they're talking about in new federal spending. Now, in general, tax cuts are more palatable to Republicans than new government spending.
Mr. Obama downplayed that political consideration today. He noted that throughout much of the campaign he was pushing for tax cuts targeted especially to working families, maybe including those who don't pay income taxes, but who do pay payroll taxes. The new line, though, of business cuts does seem to be calculated to win support for the stimulus package from the GOP.
NORRIS: That's NPR's Scott Horsley. Thanks so much, Scott.
HORSLEY: Good to be with you.