White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain will leave his position within the next few weeks in what would be the most significant personnel change at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue since Joe Biden first took office. According to a leading Washington, DC, newspaper, citing “four people familiar with the decision,” Mr. Biden has tapped Jeff Zients to replace Klain, who had planned to depart sometime after the 2022 midterm elections. However, in keeping with the Biden White House’s stellar record of eschewing transparency, Klain refused to confirm or deny the decision as recently as Jan. 21, when he told NBC News, “We have no announcement right now.”
It is an inopportune time, to say the least, for one of the White House’s most influential positions to be handed over to someone new. If Donald Trump were still in office, the establishment media would be pointing to this departure as yet another sign of chaos, mismanagement, and discord within the president’s team – as they did almost every time any Trump White House advisor or staffer resigned. That the news breaks as the chief executive finds himself embroiled in two scandals and several unraveling policy disasters only feeds into the growing suspicion that Biden is falling out of favor with prominent Democrats.
New WH Chief of Staff Should Buckle Up
Klain is a savvy political operative, a true Washington insider whose relationship with Biden goes all the way back to the latter’s time in the US Senate. While it is not so very unusual for a president’s first chief of staff to remain on the job for no more than around two years, Klain will likely be viewed by some as trying to make a clean getaway before congressional Republicans ramp up their investigations into the multiple Biden administration failures. Then, there is the unfolding classified documents debacle and the Biden family’s history of questionable business activities that will also be under the microscope probably for most of the next two years or longer.
Jeff Zients (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Klain worked on Biden’s unsuccessful presidential bids in 1988 and 2008 and was a senior advisor to his boss’s 2020 campaign. So, while his departure can be viewed as a sign of big trouble, it might also indicate that Biden is mustering his forces for a re-election fight – with Klain figuring into those plans.
Zients, who has earned the nickname “Mr. Fix-It,” is no newcomer to politics, either – or to the White House. Until early 2022, Jeff Zients led the Biden administration’s markedly substandard COVID response. Is it fair to employ such a description? Consider that during the Trump years, the number of reported coronavirus deaths was used on a daily basis to demonstrate the scale of the 45th president’s failure. More Americans have died from the virus since Biden took office than before he assumed the mantle. So, yes, a markedly substandard COVID response is, perhaps, a nice way of putting it. A Jan. 2022 article published in The American Prospect, a decidedly left-wing publication, had these glowing words for Zients and his management of the fight against the virus: “Biden’s COVID czar has gone from ‘Mr. Fix-It’ to grim reaper, steering the administration’s pandemic response to catastrophic lows.”
One might say that Ron Klain had the easy part. Zients is almost certainly in for a rough ride. Biden’s White House is gearing up to face a hostile legislative environment in a Republican House of Representatives, multiple investigations, and the impending start of a probably savage presidential campaign cycle. This one could be rougher than most, when the incoming chief of staff’s boss may well be fighting to hold on to a position few people – even, perhaps, among his own party – want him to retain.
