Projo Politics Blog

An outsider has joined the governor’s inside budget-cutting talks: Gary Sasse, executive director of the business-financed Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council.

On Tuesday, for example, the governor’s public schedule showed Sasse taking part in a 9-to-10:30 a.m. meeting with Department of Administration Director Beverly Najarian and inner-circle staffers Brian Stern, J.R. Pagliarini and Tim Costa, and an 11 a.m.-to-2 p.m. meeting with all of the same people plus the directors of labor and business regulation and the state budget office.

Carcieri spokesman Jeff Neal confirmed that Sasse is the only nongovernmental person on the steering committee working on the governor’s next round of cost-cutting proposals.

Over the years, Sasse has found himself on both sides of budget debates, chiding governors and lawmakers for not doing enough to dig themselves out of “structural deficits,” but also working with them behind the scenes from time to time to help undo financial messes, as he did with former Democratic Gov. Bruce G. Sundlun during the 1991 credit union and budget crises. He was also on former Republican Gov. Lincoln C. Almond’s transition team when he first took office.

Of rumors that he is positioned to take over the reins of the Department of Adminstration from Najarian at some point in the near future, Sasse commented: “I have no idea how rumors like that get started. I have never discussed it and I am not planning on discussing it.”

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