WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is expected to name Jeff Zients, who led the administration’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic at the start of Biden’s tenure, as his next chief of staff, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Biden’s current top aide, Ron Klain, is preparing to leave his job in the coming weeks.
Since serving as the coordinator of the COVID-19 response, Zients has returned to the White House in a low-profile position to work on personnel issues for the rest of Biden’s first term.
The two people familiar with the matter were not authorized to discuss Biden’s plans ahead of the official announcement and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The Washington Post first reported on Zients’ expected appointment. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
The change at the highest level of the senior staff comes as Biden passes the two-year mark in office and pivots to a defensive stance against the majority of House Republicans hungry to investigate the actions of the administration and his family. The White House remains contentious over the discovery of classified documents at Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, and at his former institute in Washington, with the latest tranche of records disclosed Saturday afternoon.
Biden, 80, is also preparing to launch his re-election campaign in the coming weeks, buoyed by a string of legislative achievements in his first two years as president when Democrats controlled both chambers of Capitol Hill. He faces an unformed Republican presidential field but is currently led by former President Donald Trump, whom Biden defeated in 2020.
The president’s top advisers, in addition to Zients, on politics and legislation will continue to include presidential adviser Steve Ricchetti, senior advisers Mike Donilon and Anita Dunn, director of legislative affairs Louisa Terrell, and Jen O’Malley Dillon and Bruce Reed, who are deputy chiefs of staff .
Klain will remain in Biden’s political orbit, according to people familiar with his plans — not unlike the role played by Cedric Richmond, who was the president’s first director of the White House Office of Public Engagement and is now a senior adviser to the National Democratic Party. Committee.
The outgoing chief of staff is also known to be friendly with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. But some of Zients’ liberal critics were quick to attack the appointment even before it was official, particularly his ties to the private sector.
Jeff Hauser, founder and director of the Revolving Door Project, a progressive group that supports liberal officials in government, said Sunday that Zients’ choice as a top White House aide did not fit Biden’s “Scranton Joe” political image.
“Unfortunately, Zients is a veteran of private equity, a bustling health care provider, and Big Tech, which raises a fundamental question that could determine Biden’s political future: Will an executive branch led by Zients pursue unpopular misconduct like Jeffrey Zients?” he said. Hauser. “It’s going against Zients’ character to break corporate laws, but it’s also the only way Biden can hold on to the populist mantle against the likes of (Florida Gov. Ron) DeSantis and Trump.”
“Ron Klain has been an open ear and engaging actor in the Democratic Party,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. “Whoever is the next Chief of Staff, it will be an ongoing hope and expectation. There will likely be an initial rapport and trust-building phase.
Zients, Biden’s vice chairman of transition operations after the November 2020 election, brings significant managerial expertise in government and the private sector. He was director of the National Economic Council during the Obama administration and acting director of the Office of Management and Budget.
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Former President Barack Obama also enlisted Zients in 2009 to eliminate a backlog of applicants for the Cash for Clunkers program, which provides rebates to drivers who trade in their old cars for fuel-efficient vehicles. Zients later took on the same challenge to smooth the sign-up for the updated version of the GI Bill.
Another upcoming perk for White House aides: Zients, who was an early investor in Call Your Mother, a bagel shop in Washington, has a penchant for hosting “Bagel Wednesdays” for staff. (Zients divested his stake before joining the White House in 2021).
Zients and his deputy on the White House pandemic response team, Natalie Quillian, left the Biden administration at the end of April before quietly returning in the fall of 2022. As they left, Biden thanked them for the “remarkable” and “consequential” progress against the pandemic.
“When Jeff took this job, less than 1% of Americans were fully vaccinated; less than half of our schools were open; and unlike developed countries, Americans did not have at-home COVID tests,” Biden said when the White House announced Zients’ departure last year the past “Today, nearly 80% of adults are fully vaccinated; over 100 million are boosted; virtually every school is open; and hundreds of millions of home tests are distributed every month.
Kim reports from Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.