Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With Allie Bice. Send tips | Subscribe here| Email Alex | Email Max Chief of staff RON KLAIN hasn’t said he’s planning to leave the White House any time soon but current and former Biden administration officials are already openly speculating about his successor. In conversations with over a dozen such officials over the past few months, one name is always at the top of the list: JEFF ZIENTS, the White House Covid-19 response coordinator. The only debate is if he’s the frontrunner to be the next chief of staff or just a frontrunner. Klain’s recent interview with the Washington Post only fueled speculation about his departure after he pointed out that past chiefs of staff have typically left before the two-year mark. “It is a grinding job, there’s no question about it,” he told the Post. “It takes a lot of stamina to do it. So we’ll see how long it lasts.” As scrutiny has mounted over the Biden administration’s sluggish response to Omicron, several officials — including Klain, CDC Director ROCHELLE WALENSKY, and Health and Human Services Secretary XAVIER BECERRA — have taken heat for the missteps. But Zients, who runs the Covid team and makes nearly every major decision about the direction of the pandemic response, has emerged largely unscathed. He has yet to be called to testify before Congress about the Covid response. And unlike Walensky and Dr. ANTHONY FAUCI , he has made only a handful of television appearances. He doesn’t have a public Twitter account either, mirroring the approach of many in Biden’s inner circle. The result: he is, effectively, invisible to much of the public even as he wields immense power over Biden’s top priority. “Everything that gets to the president gets filtered through Zients,” one person familiar with the matter said of the Covid response decision-making process. Asked in a Senate hearing last month who is the “head coach” of the Covid-19 response, Fauci pointed to Zients. Despite the heat the administration has recently taken on Covid, even from former health policy transition advisers, Zients still enjoys a deep well of support in the West Wing. “I've worked with a lot of people in Washington over the years and Jeff really stands out as a real star,” Fauci told West Wing Playbook. A senior White House official, who spoke about internal dynamics on condition of anonymity, told us, “I always joke that his brain is like an Excel spreadsheet – it can store and crunch data like few others.” Other administration officials note that Zients puts in the effort to win over staff. One former staffer noted Zients “had the team over to his house for dinner and drinks as a ‘thank you’ one night back when it was still warm enough to be outside and ‘safe’ in September or October.” Several current and former White House officials said Zients will bring three boxes of bagels to the building every Wednesday from the D.C. shop Call Your Mother, which he used to co-own. Zients’ appeal, at least to some, is that he is more focused on management than ideology. During the 2020 presidential transition, even then-White House adviser and Trump son-in-law JARED KUSHNER vouched for Zients to fellow Trump officials. A spokesperson for Kushner did not respond. A Biden transition official said Zients is the “king of super quick calls: ‘Hey. Three things, boom, boom, boom.’” The official also said that “a lot of people claim to be up at 5 a.m. but he really is and emailing by 5:15.” But that business-oriented, hyper-efficient mentality has also earned him detractors in the left-wing of the party. “Fire Jeff Zients,” ran a headline in The American Prospect last month. Some Trump administration officials, meanwhile, argue that the Biden Covid team has gotten a pass from the media on their stumbles. Since joining Obama’s budget office in 2009, Zients’ management skills and reputation for delivering results despite bureaucratic hurdles have catapulted him from one high-level role to another — first at OMB, where he did a couple stints as acting director, then running the National Economic Council, and most famously helping fix healthcare.gov after its disastrous launch. His ascension in Biden World has been swift compared to the aides who have been with the president for decades. He became a founding board member of the Biden Cancer Initiative in 2017 and then tried to help sort out the Biden primary campaign’s finances in the winter of 2019 to 2020, when the campaign was on the ropes. From there, Zients took the lead on Biden’s transition team before being tasked with leading the critical Covid response. The senior administration roles surprised even Zients’ old colleagues, who wondered how and when Zients had managed to grow so close to the president-elect, two people familiar with the matter said. Some critics have argued the Covid team ought to be led by someone with more experience in public health, but Fauci told West Wing Playbook he thinks that criticism is misguided. “I mean, we’ve got enough public health people that are on the team,” he said. “I think Jeff’s the perfect person for the job. And he's doing a terrific job. I mean, I don't think you’ll hear even the slightest criticism from anybody who actually works with him.” “But since we live in the wonderful town of Washington, D.C., somebody's always got something bad to say about somebody.” TEXT US — Did we miss something about Zients or the Covid response? Send us an email or text and we will try to include your thoughts in the next day’s edition. Can be anonymous, on background, etc. Email us at westwingtips@politico.com or you can text/Signal Alex at 8183240098 or Max at 7143455427. Do you work in the Biden administration? Are you in touch with the White House? Are you NATALIE QUILLIAN, Zients’ deputy on the White House Covid team? (Email/text us! Please?)
| 
