President Joe Biden is expected to name businessman and former COVID-19 response coordinator Jeff Zienz as his new chief of staff, sources familiar with the matter confirmed to PBS NewsHour.
Ron Klain, Biden’s current top aide, will step down in the coming weeks, according to the same source. The change in the president’s circle of close advisers comes as Biden’s team prepares to run for re-election and prepares for House Republicans’ investigations into the White House and Biden’s family.
Here’s a brief background on Zients.
The Zients have a history of assisting Democratic administrations.
The Zients have served the Obama administration in several capacities. Entrepreneurs and Management Consultants:
- Solved the backlog in President Barack Obama’s Cash for Clunkers program in 2009. The now-defunct program offered rebates on older cars so owners could buy more fuel-efficient vehicles.
- Led the restoration of the Affordable Care Act website, HealthCare.gov, after a failed website launch in 2013.
- Appointed the first “Chief Performance Officer” of the Office of Management and Budget, a position designed to help streamline government.
- Also served as Deputy Director and Acting Director of OMB.
- Served on the National Economic Council for about four years.
Zients first joined Biden’s team as vice chair for the 2020 presidential transition. Later named Covid-19 czar, Zients oversaw the rollout of the vaccine and oversaw other COVID-19 projects. However, he has also been criticized for optimistically predicting a COVID-free summer in 2021 as the delta variant spreads in cities around the world, and a shortage of rapid tests in December 2021 as the omicron wave sweeps the US.
National Economic Council Director Jeff Zients and Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett flank President Barack Obama during a meeting with company executives and their small business suppliers on July 11, 2014.Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
Critics have focused on Zients’ corporate background and role in the COVID response.
Zients’ upcoming appointment, which has not been officially announced, has come under some scrutiny.
Jeff Hauser, founder and executive director of the progressive group Revolving Door Project, said in a statement that Zients’ private sector background involves a variety of corporate practices that a Biden administration should actively suppress.Hauser pointed to Zients’ two-year tenure on Facebook’s board and his oversight of the health care company that paid millions to settle Medicare and Medicaid fraud allegations
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Left-leaning consumer advocacy group Public Citizen has criticized the Biden administration and the Zients for failing to make vaccines more accessible to the rest of the world, especially countries that cannot afford them.
“The United States and [other] Rich countries refuse to share vaccine technology with developing countries and fail to provide enough vaccines,” the group wrote in April 2022 when Zients resigned as COVID-19 response coordinator.
“Jeff Zients failed and the world paid the price,” the statement said.
What does the Chief of Staff do and why is this role important?
The president’s chief of staff serves as the White House’s operations manager, ensuring the agency’s operations and priorities are maintained, said Peter Logue, an associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University.
“It’s not exciting, it’s operational. It’s messy enough. [The] The job is to reduce confusion, increase predictability, and reduce drama. Let the President, Cabinet, and senior staff focus on getting what they need to get done. “
The chief of staff also acts as a “gatekeeper,” managing who the president communicates with and who he doesn’t communicate with.
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“If you’re in charge of anything, it’s easy to get obsessed with just answering the phone or answering every email that everyone wants to talk to…and don’t have time to do what you were hired to do, which in this case was national ,” Logue said.
Logue said Zients was chosen because of Biden’s trust in him and his background in managing large, complex organizations. He also brings experience from the Obama administration, when the president faced a hostile Republican Congress – something that Biden will now have to grapple with, starting with a possible debt-ceiling showdown.
This particular conflict “wasn’t something a lot of people had done before because luckily, it didn’t happen very often. So he went in with a little bit of experience.”
Andy Slavitt, a former senior adviser to Biden on pandemic response, told the NewsHour that the Zeints are “focused on execution, the no-funny thing of getting the government to decide.”
Slavitt worked with Zients during both the Biden and Obama administrations, including fixing the Affordable Care Act website in 2013.
“Sometimes we work on the ACA together, and we talk every two hours, including in the middle of the night,” Slavitt said.
“Basically, metaphorically, he’ll crawl into a foxhole and you say, ‘Okay, what do we need to do?'”
Logue believes that criticism of Zients from groups like the Revolving Door Project is misplaced.
“His job is not to set policy or policy direction. His job is not to say who should get how much or what laws should be enforced. His job is to make the machine go,” Loge said.
Logue noted that serving as a gatekeeper could give the chief of staff the ability to control whose perspectives the president listens to. But he also doubts that after 50 years in national politics, Biden might change his views.
“Biden knows what Biden’s going to do, right?” Logue said. “Biden has served in the U.S. Senate for a long, long time. He has served as the vice president of the United States for eight years. He has been the president of the United States for two years. There is not a single issue where he has no opinion.”
Laura Barrón-López and Geoff Bennett contributed to this report.
