Jeff Zients, aka 'Mr. Fix-It,' takes on DC's most brutal job: White House chief of staff

WASHINGTON – Mr. Fix-It has his hands full.

Jeff Zients, a management expert and government official with a reputation for conquering the most impossible of tasks, embarked last week upon what may be his toughest challenge yet. He is the new White House chief of staff.

Zients is known for making things work. But the challenges he will face as chief of staff are like no challenges he has faced before.

The war in Ukraine shows no signs of ending. Fears the country could slip into a recession persist; a government report released Tuesday showed inflation is slowly easing but probably will keep prices elevated well into this year.

The administration is facing a showdown with congressional Republicans on raising the limit on how much money the government can borrow. House Republicans, emboldened by their new but razor-thin majority, are plotting a series of investigations into President Joe Biden and members of his family.

Adding to the frenzy, Biden is expected to announce in the coming weeks that he will run for a second term next year.

The pressures that come with a White House job aren’t new to Zients. He held senior-level government positions under President Barack Obama, most notably rescuing the flailing website healthcare.gov that was supposed to help Americans shop for health insurance – but kept crashing and leaving shoppers in the lurch.

When Biden took office, he hired Zients to lead the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic – a monumental task that included setting up a mass vaccination program for millions of Americans.

White House chief of staff, however, is a different beast. It’s the most brutal, thankless job in Washington, said Chris Whipple, author of “The Gatekeepers,” a 2017 book that chronicled the successes and failures of White House chiefs of staff.

“You get all of the blame for things that go wrong and none of the credit for stuff that goes right,” Whipple said.

A hectic first week

Zients, 56, got a taste of what’s ahead in his first week on the job.

His first day was last Wednesday – the morning after Biden was heckled repeatedly by some House Republicans while delivering his State of the Union address.

While Zients was starting his workday, a GOP-led House committee was opening a congressional hearing on allegations that Twitter had suppressed news reports about Hunter Biden’s laptop to give his father an advantage during the 2020 presidential election.

A couple of days later, on Friday, Biden ordered a U.S. military fighter jet to shoot down an unknown object flying off the coast of Alaska – less than a week after the military shot down a Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina. Over the weekend, the military would shoot two other unidentified objects out of the sky – one over Canada, the other over Lake Huron in Michigan.

At his first staff meeting, Zients won the hearts (and stomachs) of some staffers when he announced plans to bring back at least one White House tradition.

Zients, an initial investor in the bagel shop Call Your Mother, got into the habit of bringing bagels to work on Wednesdays when he was leading the administration’s pandemic response. Bagel Wednesdays will return to the White House now that he’s chief staff, he said. (For the record, Zients divested his shares in Call Your Mother before joining the administration in 2021.)

How Zients became 'Mr. Fix-It'

Joe Biden had a problem.

The new president had been in office just a matter of weeks and was struggling to get millions of Americans vaccinated against a deadly virus that was killing 3,000 people a day. Biden was hearing reports from Black leaders that community health centers, which provide care to low-income and underserved communities, weren’t getting the same access to the COVID-19 vaccine as traditional doctors’ offices or pharmacies.

Biden turned to the man known around the White House as Mr. Fix-It. He called on Zients.

Two or three days later, Zients returned with a plan.

“He had reached out to (Congress) members. He had reached out to community health experts. He had reached out to state medical directors,” said Anita Dunn, a senior adviser to Biden. “He mobilized his team to solve that problem. And he came in with an extremely well-thought-out plan to get it done.”

“That’s Jeff,” Dunn said.

As chief of staff, Zients replaces Ron Klain, a longtime Biden aide and confidante who held the job for the first two years of Biden’s term as president. Klain, regarded for his intelligence and his political acumen, had been by Biden’s side throughout his political career, including his years as senator and vice president.

Zients hasn’t known Biden as long as Klain, but he has known him for years. They met back in 2009, when Biden was vice president and Obama tapped Zients to help streamline the federal government. Zients would go on to hold other senior-level positions under Obama, including a stint as acting director of the National Economic Council and another as director of Office of Management and Budget.

Biden was so impressed that, after he was elected president, he hired Zients to direct his transition team and, later, when he took office, to lead the government’s COVID-19 response.

“When I ran for office, I promised to make the government work for the American people. And that’s what Jeff does,” Biden said at an event Feb. 2 at the White House marking Klain's departure and Zients' appointment to the job.

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'Different perspectives, different backgrounds'

It's hard to overstate the importance of the White House chief of staff, said Whipple, who published a book last month on the first half of the Biden administration called “The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House.”

Without James Baker III, Ronald Reagan’s first chief of staff, there would have been no Reagan Revolution, Whipple said. Bill Clinton might well have been a one-term president if not for his second chief of staff, Leon Panetta, Whipple said.

People who know Zients say he’s a natural fit for the job. They describe him as smart, savvy and skilled – a wunderkind who’s also an effective manager, the kind of boss who listens to all ideas and isn’t afraid to delegate responsibilities. Other supervisors may respond to a subordinate’s questions or concerns by firing off a quick email or text, but Zients picks up the phone.

"I see him make calls constantly," said Natalie Quillian, who worked as his deputy on the White House COVID-19 response team and will be his deputy chief of staff. "They can be three minutes here, three minutes there. But he is steadfast about getting back to people, returning every call.”

Zients loves engaging with other people, Quillian said.

“He thrives on it," she said. "He believes the answer will be better when people are around a table debating it – that diverse group of people from different perspectives, different backgrounds. That’s core to who he is and how he manages.”

Andy Slavitt, who worked alongside Zients on the COVID-19 response and when they were trying to salvage healthcare.com, said that in the early, crucial stages of the website project, he and Zients would talk every couple of hours – even in the middle of the night.

“We would be talking at 2 a.m., 4 a.m. and 6 a.m.,” Slavitt said.

Jeff Peck, a longtime Biden aide who worked with Zients on the presidential transition, described him as “probably the best manager I’ve ever worked with.”

“He's indefatigable. He is unflappable,” Peck said.

Not everyone is smitten.

Max Moran, a researcher at the Revolving Door Project, which works to counteract Wall Street’s influence in government, suggested in an essay published late last month in The American Prospect that Zients’ ties to the corporate world could cloud his judgment as chief of staff and implied he lacks the “political sophistication” to be effective in the job.

Before he began his string of federal appointments, Zients worked in management consulting for Bain & Co., a Boston-based firm whose alumni include Mitt Romney. He also held other corporate positions, including chairman of the Corporate Executive Board, which offers consulting services to business leaders.

Zients is worth $90 million to $400 million, according to the financial disclosure he filed when he entered the White House in 2021.

Zients’ record “primarily shows a talent for making his fellow elites like him, mostly by saying what they want to hear,” Moran wrote. “If this choice is an indicator of the direction Biden hopes to take the second half of his presidential term, we should all be very concerned for the next two years of policymaking.”

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The right manager at the right time

Though White House chief of staff is a management job at its core, it also involves heavy doses of policy and politics. Decisions that cross the chief’s desk are often filtered through the lens of politics. Klain was effective in part because he was politically savvy and had a deep working knowledge of Capitol Hill, said Whipple, who regards Klain as one of the best chiefs of staff in history.

Zients “is great as a manager,” Whipple said, “but he lacks Ron’s political savvy and relationships on Capitol.”

People who know Zients scoff at the suggestion that he doesn’t have the political chops to do the job.

“He may not have started his career as a volunteer on campaigns, knocking on doors. But he has been involved in political processes at the very highest levels of government now for two administrations,” Dunn said. “Jeff is very realistic about what his strengths are. Everybody brings different strengths and weaknesses to all of these jobs.”

If anything, his supporters say, Zients is the right manager in the right job at the right time.

Biden has reached the halfway point of his four-year term. During the first two years, much of the job involved hiring people and deciding who would be doing what, said Ted Kaufman, who was Biden’s chief of staff in the Senate and briefly filled Biden’s seat after he was elected vice president.

“Now you’ve got this thing up and running, it’s going to be managing it – how do we get the right person on the right phone call at the right time to make the right decision?” Kaufman said. “It’s a gigantic management challenge.”

With a bureaucracy as vast as the federal government, the White House chief of staff can’t micromanage every problem that crosses his desk. One of Zients’ strong suits – and one that will serve him well in his new job – is that he’s not afraid to delegate, said Minyon Moore, who was the White House political director under Clinton and worked with Zients on Biden’s transition.

“He doesn’t feel like he has to be the person that has to do everything,” Moore said. As chief of staff, “Jeff will inherit a great team. I have no doubt that he will rise to the occasion. No doubt in my mind.”

Michael Collins covers the White House. Follow him on Twitter @mcollinsNEWS.

Contributing: The Associated Press

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Jeff Zients takes on Biden's chief of staff role, replacing Ron Klain