Jeffrey D. Zients
Deputy Director, OMB; Federal Chief Performance Officer (since June 2009)
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(Thomas Heath/TWP)
You can call him President Obama's weed-wacker. But instead of trimming the front yard, Zients is tasked with removing the ineffective and irrelevant programs run by the federal government.
As Obama made room for health-care reform and economic stabilization initiatives, he created the chief performance officer (CPO) role to ferret out and eliminate waste inside the federal budget. When Peter Orszag left the White House on July 30, 2010, Zients became acting Office of Management and Budget head while Jack Lew waited for Senate confirmation.
A product of Kensington, Md., Zients grew up as an avid baseball fan. As a child, he would pore over classified ads and garage sales in order to find a new treasure to add to his massive baseball-card collection. By the time he went to college, he had built up $30,000 worth of valuable baseball cards. Unfortunately, his athletic talent did not match his enthusiasm for sports, so Zients instead led the sports desk at his high-school paper.
For college, Zients attended Duke University. He then moved to Boston to work at Bain & Company before heading back to the D.C. area to join the Advisory Board in 1992.
One of the key posts that Obama created in his new administration was the chief performance officer. Housed in the powerful OMB offices, the CPO sifts through the federal budget to decide which government programs are irrelevant, inefficient and outdated. This daunting job originally went to McKinsey & Co. Senior Director Nancy Killefer. But in February 2006, Killefer suddenly resigned once it became public that she had failed to pay some employee taxes for household workers. This left the president without a CPO for the first four months of his administration.
In April 2009, the search for Killefer's replacement ended when Obama announced Zients as his CPO choice. The CPO announcement came two days before Obama's first all-Cabinet meeting in which he ordered the group to collectively trim $100 million in costs from their budgets within 90 days.
Zients worked in the OMB office with OMB Secretary Peter Orszag until his departured and then with Jack Lew, Orszag's successor. On the government reform initiative, his assistant was former White House Staff Secretary Lisa Brown.
Zients tenure at the Advisory Board coincided with the Obama administration's Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra, who he will work with at the OMB. Zients will also be working closely with Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra.
Zients has donated just over $90,000 since 1999, almost all of which went to Democratic candidates. However, there are two exceptions. Zients donated $500 to former Sen. Mike DeWine (R-Ohio) in 2003 and $2,000 to Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) in 2005. Zients did not donate to either presidential candidate in 2008, but he did give $4,500 then-Sen. Obama (D-Ill.) from 2004 to 2006.
- Fletcher, Michael A., "At His First Official Cabinet Meeting, Obama Orders Cuts," The Washington Post, April 21, 2009
- Montgomery, Lori, "With a Light Touch, Heavy Hitters Pursue D.C. Team," The Washington Post, Aug. 17, 2004
- Heath, Thomas and Nakamura, David, "Lerner Expected To Get Nationals," The Washington Post, May 2, 2006
- Levey, Noam N., "Obama aims to cut wasteful spending," Los Angeles Times, April 19, 2009
- Boorstin, Julia; Freedman, Jonah and Tkaczyk, Christopher, "America's 40 Richest Under 40," Fortune, Sept. 16, 2002
- Heath, Thomas, "Two Area Groups, Smulyan Lead in Bid to Own Nats," The Washington Post, Oct. 15, 2005
- Shin, Annys, "Zients Is at the Top of His Game," The Washington Post, Oct. 4, 2004
- Phillip, Abby, Politico, Zients to lead gov't reform initiative, Jan. 31, 2011
- Center for Responsive Politics
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