The Businessman Behind the Obama Budget
By MONICA LANGLEY
WASHINGTON—Most mornings, an intense 45-year-old man, little known outside the West Wing, is the first to arrive at the daily meeting of the White House senior staff.
He is a wealthy entrepreneur, but he comes to work in a plug-in Chevy Volt, leaving his Aston Martin parked discreetly at home. He sits in a wingback chair facing the chief of staff and often hands out charts detailing the political divide of 2012—the Democrats' battle with the Republicans over the size and shape of the federal budget.
White House budget director Jeff Zients at a Senate Budget Committee hearing in Washington in February.
He is Jeff Zients, the head of President Barack Obama's Office of Management and Budget and perhaps the least likely player in the political dramas of the campaign. Like Mitt Romney, the man who would unseat his boss, Mr. Zients (rhymes with science) got his professional start at Bain Consulting. Until stumbling into an administration job a couple of years ago, he had almost no involvement in government or politics. He became budget director almost by default.
Yet he now oversees the administration's budget content and message, which are central to the president's argument that he has a balanced plan to expand the economy while Republican budgets would rip the country's social fabric and undermine the education and infrastructure needed to succeed economically.
Mr. Zients's analytical work shaped the harsh White House response to the Republican budget plan presented by Congress earlier this year, and it was critical to Mr. Obama's recent, high-profile speech in Cleveland, which roundly criticized GOP spending plans.
In recent days, he has upped the ante. Several times a week, Mr. Zients issues pronouncements of the administration's opposition to spending bills that don't adhere to a budget deal—a kind of uneasy truce—the president and Republicans in Congress agreed to last year. He leads the administration's preparations for dealing with the "fiscal cliff," the potential postelection moment at year's end when the Bush-era tax cuts expire, the debt ceiling is breached and giant spending cuts kick in simultaneously.
Just this week, he wrote an opinion piece for Politico that warned Congress—and, implicitly, its Republican leaders—that it would be responsible for automatic spending cuts that would have "devastating" consequences if it can't come up with a bipartisan alternative to reduce the deficit. Those cuts, he said, would do "severe harm to many of the investments most critical for our country's long-term economic growth."
House Republicans are increasingly pushing back, complaining that it is the administration that won't discuss its ideas for a bill to mitigate the impact of the automatic cuts, especially in military spending. Republican House and Senate leaders this week sent the White House a joint letter underscoring that complaint.
Along the way, Mr. Zients has become a kind of unofficial ambassador to the business community, which has famously strained relations with the White House. He occasionally meets with the heads of the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable and is Mr. Obama's liaison with the chief executives on the president's Jobs Council. One CEO thought Mr. Zients was a Republican. A few others have said they want him to run their companies one day.
But it is the budget debate that defines the deep divide between the two parties.
Democrats say their approach avoids the kind of austerity that many blame for stunting Europe's recovery while mapping a long-term path for taming deficits and debt. Republicans say the president's budget lays the foundation for an enduring addiction to excessive spending.
"The president's budget is a 10-year budget that increases the debt by $11 trillion, never reaches close to balance," Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, a former budget director under President George W. Bush and a leading candidate for Mr. Romney's running mate, said at a press lunch. "We have a higher debt-to-GDP ratio than the European average, higher than Spain. So we are heading down that path."
Mr. Zients publicly defends the Obama budget as "a plan for an economy that's built to last." White House aides give him high marks for his framing of the administration's arguments, and the president has steadily promoted him internally.
His presentations haven't been without their glitches. In his initial congressional testimony on the budget, he stumbled on whether the administration considered the mandate that all Americans acquire health insurance or pay a penalty a "tax"—the very question on which the Supreme Court last month ultimately upheld the health-care law.
Operating in the political fishbowl is a new experience for Mr. Zients. He grew up in the Washington area, though his interests ran more to business than to government. As a youngster, he scoured garage sales for Topps baseball cards, using earnings first from a paper route and later from jobs including a plumber's assistant. As a teen, he hired his sisters to sort the growing stockpile. By the time he went to Duke University, the collection was worth $30,000.
After graduating from college in 1988, Mr. Zients started as a consultant at Bain & Co. in Boston, where he says he "fell in love with Bain's culture, teamwork…and analytical rigor," according to a Bain alumni newsletter. (He didn't work with Mr. Romney, who already had left to start Bain Capital.)
At Bain, Mr. Zients reported to Mary Menell, four years his senior, who became his wife, with whom he now has four children. They were married in Mrs. Zients's homeland of South Africa, with Nelson Mandela, her parents' friend, in attendance.
Mr. Zients left Bain to return to his hometown and become an entrepreneur. He helped run Advisory Board Co., a research firm, and its spinoff, Corporate Executive Board, which together grew to more than 1,000 employees, and launched an initial public offering for each. In 2002, Fortune magazine named Mr. Zients in its list of the 40 richest Americans under 40. His net worth is conservatively estimated at around $200 million.
After Mr. Zients donated to 2008 Democratic presidential candidates Mr. Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton, an unexpected door opened. Mr. Obama set up a new position, "chief performance officer," to cut bureaucracy and government costs, but the original nominee was forced to withdraw because of a tax controversy. A fellow entrepreneur, Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, says he floated Mr. Zients's name, not knowing whether Mr. Zients would be interested in the job.
He was. He shed most of his corporate holdings and set up shop within the White House complex. When former budget director Jack Lew suddenly was named chief of staff earlier this year, Mr. Zients took his place.
His early days in the White House proved a bit of a culture shock. Before each meeting, Mr. Zients asked his staff, "Where's the killer slide?" meaning a single graphic that crystallized a problem or solution. "At first, we thought Jeff had a weird obsession about having a single slide," said one senior administration official.
His PowerPoint shows have become a hit with the president and his top aides. In the memo culture of the White House, Mr. Zients first had to show them in the secure "situation room," for its wiring. The Roosevelt Room has since been equipped to handle Mr. Zients's business-style presentations. |
