The Biden White House is moving extremely quickly on replacing outgoing Chief of Staff Ron Klain, and former WH COVID response czar/Midterm shuffle transition aide Jeff Zients is the person for the job.
President Biden will name Jeff Zients to serve as his next chief of staff, turning to a management consultant who oversaw the administration’s coronavirus response to replace Ron Klain, who is expected to leave in the coming weeks, according to four people familiar with the decision.
Zients left the White House in April after steering the administration’s pandemic response and leading the largest vaccination campaign in U.S. history. He returned to the White House in the fall to help Klain prepare for staff turnover after the midterms — a project that was ultimately limited in scope, as few senior staff members have left across the administration. But, in recent weeks, Klain has assigned him different projects, which some viewed as preparing Zients for the top role, people familiar with the arrangement said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters.
A White House spokesperson declined to comment.
Zients takes over the top job as Biden is entering a new and challenging stretch of his presidency: Republicans have already launched a barrage of investigations into the administration and the business dealings of the president’s son. Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed a special counsel to investigate the handling of classified documents found at Biden’s personal office and Wilmington, Del., home. And Biden is preparing to launch his reelection bid.
Zients comes into the job with a vastly different profile than Klain: His first government job was during the Obama administration, and he has spent most of his career in the private sector. He has only ever worked in the executive branch. His personal Twitter account has no posts.
But colleagues have praised Zients as a master implementer who engenders deep loyalty from the people he oversees.
As Biden ramps up his political activity, some Democrats said they expect the structure of the chief of staff role to change, with Biden’s political advisers, including Anita Dunn, Jen O’Malley Dillon, Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti and Bruce Reed, taking on even more prominence in the building.
They compared the arrangement to that of the Obama White House, when Jack Lew served as chief of staff in 2012 and focused on keeping the federal government running, while David Plouffe, a political strategist, came into the White House from 2011 to 2013 as a senior adviser to oversee the reelection campaign. Democrats say Dunn, a senior adviser, will serve in a Plouffe-like role.
So the message being sent here is that Zients is a fighter and will be free to take on the House GOP Circus of the Damned, while Anita Dunn will run Biden's 2024 campaign.
Having said that, Zients will certainly find himself a giant target of House Republicans, both for his new role and for his runningCOVID-19 response last year. Let's hope he's as much of a combatant as he is a manager, because Kevin McCarthy's clown crew is definitely going to try to drag him into hearing after hearing.
We'll see how he fares, but it looks like this has been in the works for a while now, and he's had time to prepare for the sheer magnitude of the job ahead, and the stakes that are in play, starting with the GOP trying to default on America's debt and pitch us headfirst into a depression with millions of job losses and untold misery.
No pressure, Jeff...
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