White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew Could Be Named As Geithner’s Replacement

Steve Dibert, MFI-Miami

It appears that President Obama is close to finally naming a replacement for outgoing Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.  Bloomberg reports the President will be nominating White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew for the position as soon as this week.  Although the nomination has not been confirmed, Bloomberg reports that White House staff has been,  “instructed to prepare for his nomination, said one of the people. Among the leading candidates to replace Lew as Obama’s chief of staff are Denis McDonough, currently a deputy national security adviser, and Ron Klain, who had served as Vice President Joe Biden’s chief of staff.”

The Huffington Post’s  Mark Gongloff and Christina Wilkie first reported on the possibility of Lew being nominated in November saying,

Lew, who previously ran Obama’s Office of Management and Budget, is known in Washington as a top-notch negotiator who understands federal spending like few others and who can make difficult decisions in order to cut a bipartisan deal. Lew’s reputation was forged in the Clinton administration, where he played a pivotal role in the negotiations that resulted in Clinton’s historic 1997 Balanced Budget Act.

To Beltway insiders, Lew’s appointment as Treasury Secretary would be taken as a sign that Obama intends to prioritize budget and tax policy negotiations in his second term, in spite of a fiercely divided Congress.

“Jack has experience negotiating balanced budgets with a Republican Congress, and he’d bring that to bear on anything he worked on,” said Michael Barr, a former assistant secretary of the Treasury for Financial Institutions under Obama who worked with Lew in the Clinton administration.