The White House is going through perhaps its biggest transition since 2021 as Jeff Zients takes over as chief of staff.
Zients took the reins from Ron Klain, a longtime associate of President Joe Biden, on Feb. 8 as the Biden administration adjusts to a GOP-controlled House and potential reelection campaign.
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“We’re excited to officially welcome Jeff Zients as chief of staff today,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Zients’s first day on the job. “He is a brilliant, talented, kind leader who has earned the trust of the president and everyone who has worked with him.”
But not everyone was thrilled with Zients running White House operations, and questions could linger as Biden seeks to keep Democrats united against House Republicans.
Progressives view Zients, by far the wealthiest member of Biden’s Cabinet with assets worth at least $89.3 million, as too business-friendly and too much of a centrist.
Revolving Door Project Executive Director Jeff Hauser called the hire a “catastrophic decision” that could lead to Gov. Ron DeSantis R-FL) becoming president. Mursheed Zaheed, a progressive strategist, said Zients “embodies much of the corporate misconduct the executive branch led by a Democratic Party ought to be cracking down on.”
Klain had been working with Biden in one capacity or another as far back as the 1980s, serving as chief of staff while Biden was vice president and as chief of staff to Vice President Al Gore. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) described Klain as “one of the f***ing nicest people I’ve ever met.”
Zients, by contrast, built a fortune leading a pair of Washington-based consulting firms before getting involved with politics and later served on Facebook’s board of directors.
He helped smooth out problems with HealthCare.gov while working for the Obama White House before serving as director of the National Economic Council. Most recently, Zients was Biden’s COVID-19 czar early in his presidency, showcasing his management and organizational skills during the vaccine rollout.
“I don’t think it’s a big surprise, given Zients’s background, that progressive groups would be wary of him,” said University of Akron professor David Cohen, who is writing a book about the chief of staff position. “In the end, it’s much ado about nothing. It’s not about where they start but how they perform in the role that’s important.”
While Klain may have been friendlier with progressives, Cohen sees the Zients hire as part of a wider push toward the center for Biden as he looks toward 2024 and reelection.
The move doesn’t come without risks. The White House upset scores of House Democrats earlier this month when Biden announced he would work with Republicans to overturn a D.C. Council bill widely viewed as soft on crime.
But the White House had issued a statement of administration policy on Feb. 6, two days before Zients took over, indicating he’d do the opposite. That left 173 House Democrats feeling hung out to dry after thinking they had the president’s support.
While it’s impossible to know if the staff switch led to confusion on the matter, the chief of staff job is ultimately about executing the president’s wishes, says former Bush White House adviser Richard Painter.
“Part of the job is to get the president to be realistic about what he can and can’t do,” said Painter, the chief ethics lawyer for Bush from 2005 to 2007. “The second part of the job is to implement it.”
Both Painter and Cohen guessed that Klain could become involved in Biden’s reelection team, which could begin accumulating within the next few weeks.
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Zients, with his reputation for practical management, will also be tasked with handling the GOP-led House and the many investigations already coming at the White House.
“My guess is they’ll have to hire more lawyers. We certainly did when Democrats got control of Congress,” said Painter. “If the opposing political party gets control of a house of Congress, you definitely need a pragmatist in place to figure out how to deal with it and how to get stuff done.”
