President Obama on Friday officially named Jeffrey D. Zients, an entrepreneur who twice was the president’s acting budget director and a candidate in the past for two cabinet positions, to succeed Gene B. Sperling as the chief White House economic adviser.
As The Times’s Jackie Calmes reported earlier, the shift does not portend change in the president’s economic agenda. But when Mr. Sperling leaves on Jan. 1 after nearly three years in the White House and two at the Treasury Department, Mr. Obama will lose an adviser who has been known as a perpetual motion machine for progressive domestic policy ideas since the Clinton administration, and “a close friend,†the president said in a statement.
Mr. Zients, who joined the administration in June 2009 as the deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget, quickly impressed Mr. Obama and was long rumored for promotion. “He earned the admiration and respect of everyone he worked with,†the president said in the announcement statement.
His advancement had been complicated by Senator Max Baucus’s opposition. Mr. Baucus, the Montana Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, was against Mr. Zients’s recommendations that would have removed government functions from the committee’s jurisdiction.
