Factbox: Bowles, Simpson to chair deficit panel-official

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama has decided to name two Washington insiders to lead his bipartisan panel on the U.S. deficit: a quick-witted ex-Senate Republican leader and a former banker who helped negotiate President Bill Clinton's balanced budget.

Obama will sign an executive order on Thursday creating the panel that will look for ways to reduce the deficit, a senior administration official said on Tuesday. He will name Erskine Bowles, Clinton's former chief of staff, and Alan Simpson, the former Senate No. 2, to lead the panel, the official said.

Following are some facts about the two men:

ERSKINE BOWLES

Bowles, the president of the University of North Carolina since 2006, started his business career at Morgan Stanley in New York and later returned home to North Carolina where he founded an investment banking firm, a venture capital company and a private equity firm.

Clinton named him to lead the Small Business Administration in 1993, and Bowles later went on to become the president's chief of staff from 1996 to 1998.

While serving in that position he helped negotiate the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 with Republican congressional leaders, producing the first balanced budget in nearly 30 years.

He is credited by many with reinvigorating the Small Business Administration by accelerating lending practices, but he aggravated small businesses by backing Hillary Clinton's healthcare reform plan, which was seen as taxing small firms too heavily.

The 64-year-old university president made two unsuccessful bids for the Senate in 2002 and 2004.

Four days ago Bowles announced he would retire as president of UNC at the end of the year, saying he had planned to remain for just five years.

ALAN SIMPSON

Simpson, 78, was the No. 2 Republican in the Senate for a decade. He is known for his quick wit, salty tongue and willingness to plunge into controversial issues.

His chief legacy in the Senate was the overhaul of U.S. immigration law that was signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986 after intense lobbying by special interest groups.

He was also known as a strong voice for fiscal balance, voting in favor of the 1990 bipartisan deficit reduction agreement, a U.S. official said.

The affable Simpson served in the Senate for nearly 20 years and was Republican whip from 1985 to 1995, a time when the Senate was mainly controlled by Democrats. As Republican whip he held the second-highest Republican post in the Senate.

When the Republicans took control of Congress after the 1994 elections, Simpson lost his job to Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi, who led a conservative revolt within the party.

Simpson, whose father served as Wyoming's governor and a U.S. senator, served in the Wyoming House of Representatives from 1964 through 1977 before successfully making the political leap to the U.S. Senate in the 1978 election. He was re-elected twice and decided not to run again in 1996.