Maya MacGuineas

Maya MacGuineas is the president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, director of the Fiscal Policy Program at the New America Foundation, and head of the Fix the Debt campaign. She is a longtime deficit-cutting “hawk,” and headed the Peterson-Pew Commission on Budget Reform, which economist Dean Baker accused of using jingoism to promote its austerity agenda.

Ties to Pete Peterson's "Fix the Debt"
The Campaign to Fix the Debt is the latest incarnation of a decades-long effort by former Nixon man turned Wall Street billionaire Pete Peterson to slash earned benefit programs such as Social Security and Medicare under the guise of fixing the nation's "debt problem."

Maya MacGuineas spearheads the Fix the Debt campaign. She is the president of Fix the Debt's parent organization, the CRFB, which is a project of the Peterson-funded New America Foundation (NAF). Although she has garnered some impressive puff pieces from the mainstream media, she was dubbed "queen of the deficit scolds" by economist Paul Krugman and Social Security’s "most media friendly foe" by Salon. MacGuineas was the Social Security adviser for Republican John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign, and immediately thereafter went to NAF. Along with President George W. Bush, she has advocated for the privatizion of Social Security, as can be seen by this 2001 testimony and this PBS interview, a scheme that would have resulted in the collapse of the system had it been implemented prior to the Wall Street meltdown.

This article is part of the Center for Media and Democracy's investigation of Pete Peterson's Campaign to "Fix the Debt." Please visit our main SourceWatch page on Fix the Debt.

Undisclosed Conflict of Interest
MacGuineas' husband Robin Brooks is a managing director and a currency trading analyst at Goldman Sachs, with a reported base salary of $500,000. Goldman Sachs lobbies around federal tax issues affecting banking and securities and is a member of the Managed Funds Association, which lobbies against the financial speculation tax. She has also worked at the Concord Coalition (co-founded and funded by Pete Peterson), at the Peterson Foundation-funded Brookings Institution, and on Wall Street (as an analyst at Paine Webber).

Background
MacGuineas was the social security adviser for Republican John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign, and immediately thereafter went to the New America Foundation, from where she advocated what she called the “progressive privatization” of social security.

MacGuineas was on the board of Common Cause as of 2002.

Bio from New America Foundation
"As President of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which is housed at the New America Foundation, and the Director of the Fiscal Policy Program, Maya MacGuineas oversees the Foundation's efforts to bring accountability to the budget process, address the challenges presented by the nation's underfunded entitlements programs, and propose comprehensive tax reforms that would improve both the efficiency and equity of the tax code. Ms. MacGuineas testifies regularly before Congress and has published broadly, including articles in The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, The Financial Times, and the Los Angeles Times.

"Before coming to New America, MacGuineas served as a Social Security advisor to the McCain for President campaign. She has also worked at the Brookings Institution, the Concord Coalition and on Wall Street. She received her Master in Public Policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and serves on the Boards of a number of national, nonpartisan organizations."

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