Axelrod says Obama, Congress will come up with 'an appropriate approach' to curbing excessive pay. Axelrod hints pay limits not binding

David Axelrod, senior adviser to President Barack Obama, hinted in an interview on "Fox News Sunday" that the administration does not view the executive pay restrictions in the economic stimulus bill as binding.

Obama will sign the restrictions, which are stricter than those he announced less than two weeks ago, into law on Tuesday. But Axelrod said the administration will work with Congress to come up with "an appropriate approach" to curb excessive pay packages on Wall Street.


"He's announced his own guidelines for how we should restrict that," Axelrod said of the president. "In some ways, they're tougher than the ones that the Senate passed. They have a hard cap, for example, on compensation. And in other ways, they differ."

"So we're going to work with them, ... with the Senate, to come up — and the House — to come up with an appropriate approach to this," he continued.

"We all have the same goal. We all have the same sentiment. And we want to do something that's workable, and we'll work with them to get to that point."

Asked if he is worried that the restrictions in the stimulus bill could be counterproductive, Axelrod noted that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers, Obama's chief economic adviser, "had concerns about that."

"And they expressed those concerns," Axelrod said. "But those concerns are at the margins, and the goal is one we share," which he described as curbing "the spectacle of gaudy bonuses for executives at firms that are getting extraordinary assistance from American taxpayers."

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, asked about the bill's pay restrictions on CBS's "Face the Nation," said that “the president outlined very strong measures on exec compensation and bonuses to ensure that taxpayer money that’s supposed to be used to get our financial systems stable in lending money again isn’t lining the pockets of some of the people that got us into this mess.”

Host Bob Schieffer reminded Gibbs that the administration’s pay cap plan was not nearly as strong and stringent as that in the bill.

“I would say that many of the provisions that are in the bill are modeled after things that the president outlined in his plan,” Gibbs replied. “We’re looking forward to working with Congress to institute some of these regulations that will ensure that taxpayer money isn’t wasted, but we also have to make sure that it doesn’t hurt smaller regional banks that want to participate in this program.”

“We think we can strike the right balance,” Gibbs continued. “The president is very, very focused and wants to make sure that taxpayer money does not in any way go to excessive compensation or bonuses for CEOs that got us into this mess.

Asked if he’s satisfied with the provision as it appears now, Gibbs answered, “We will sign this bill into law on Tuesday.”