Wall Street Critics Target Biden’s Co-Leader of Transition Team
Wall Street Critics Target Biden’s Co-Leader of Transition Team
(Bloomberg) -- On Saturday, veteran finance executive Jeff Zients was named a co-chair of Joe Biden’s transition team. Before the weekend was over, Jeff Hauser, who runs the progressive Revolving Door Project, was working the phone to get him removed.
Zients is among a small group of Democrats who made a fortune at the intersection of the investment industry and corporate America, gained power in the White House and can easily weave in and out of those worlds. A former top economic adviser to Barack Obama, he hosted a Biden fundraiser in November. He served on Facebook Inc.’s board until this year, and now he’s on leave as head of the Cranemere Group, a holding company that buys businesses.
That kind of career is the envy of influence-seeking Wall Streeters, and enough to draw the attention of the Revolving Door Project at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a think tank in Washington. The group says it scrutinizes executive branch appointees to ensure they serve the public interest. The project, along with David Segal of the progressive group Demand Progress, doesn’t want someone with Zients’s deep corporate ties shaping the next government.
“Biden needs to hear from fewer wannabe Warren Buffetts, and more people with their finger on the pulse of middle America,” Hauser said. “We’re going to make an argument that his mindset is at odds with Biden’s stated goal of an FDR-style administration. We’re going to make this case publicly, and put it before voters and activists and leaders of progressive organizations.”
A spokesperson for Biden praised Zients’s acumen.
‘Management Expert’
“Jeff Zients is a management expert, known for fixing HealthCare.gov and leading the effort on the fiduciary rule in the Obama-Biden administration,” said Biden transition spokesman Cameron French. “He joined the transition to think through the best systems and processes to ensure a future Biden administration has the tools needed to address the crises facing the American people.”
Zients is far from the first financial world figure to take a post that may let him shape a modern administration. Michael Froman, once at Citigroup Inc. and now a Mastercard Inc. executive, worked on Obama’s transition before becoming his top trade adviser. Steven Mnuchin and Anthony Scaramucci, who once worked for Goldman Sachs Group Inc., were on the executive committee of Donald Trump’s presidential transition team.
Erika Karp founded the advisory firm Cornerstone Capital Group and has donated to Democrats for more than 15 years. She doesn’t want Wall Street veterans shut out of top spots.
“There are more people in finance who are moral and ethical and constructive than there are those who are not, it’s more good people than bad people,” she said. But, she added, “professionals have to earn the right to share their voice.”
Zients will help former Delaware Senator Ted Kaufman run Biden’s transition team with New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, strategist Anita Dunn and Representative Cedric Richmond of Louisiana.
The Cranemere executive is seen as a managerial guru in the McKinsey & Co. mold, someone who can put systems in place to get things rolling, according to a person familiar with the transition team’s thinking, who asked for anonymity to discuss internal work. Zients is also doing some recruiting, the person said.
Cranemere was founded by the private equity veteran Vincent Mai, who’s running the firm while Zients is on leave, according to its website. The company says its shareholders are “major families and institutions” from the U.S., Europe, Latin America and the Middle East.
The Revolving Door Project’s Hauser is prepared for the fight to be relatively lonely. “I think a large part of the party is committed to reducing the influence of revolving-door financiers,” he said. “A much smaller part of the party wants to talk about that in the context of specific people about 50 days before an election.”
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