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The answer? No one.

Ten months into the Obama Administration, the Centers For Medicare And Medicaid Services (CMS) is without a full-time leader. President Obama has yet to even nominate a candidate to head this massive agency, which runs two of the biggest programs of the federal government.  According to health expert Stephen Parente’s post on the American Enterprise Institute’s blog, CMS spends approximately $2.2 billion per day:

“Take the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) administrator post. I would find it far more credible that the administration will bend the cost curve down if a CMS administrator had been appointed nearly 9 months post inauguration (a record), and if 70 percent of other CMS posts weren’t vacant (also a record). Assuming nearly $800 billion spent on Medicare and Medicaid for an annualized 2009, each day past the president’s inauguration, $2.2 billion has been spent (with 55%+ for Medicare alone) without a leader. The civil service running such an endeavor deserve gold stars. Yet, it is inconceivable that an enterprise that is larger than any Fortune 500 firm in terms of cost outlays, let alone the revenues of No. 1 Wal-Mart and No. 2 ExxonMobil combined, is running without a chief.”

As even the President has acknowledged, “within a decade the Medicare trust fund will be in the red.” Yet instead of prioritizing the search for someone to lead this important agency, and he is dedicating enormous efforts towards pushing through his government-run health care experiment.  It really goes to show how serious the President is when it comes to expanding government, and how serious he isn’t when it comes to actually governing.