What Biden Needs Most Right Now: More Technocrats

What Biden Needs Most Right Now: More Technocrats

Matthew G Yglesias | Bloomberg — Read time: 4 minutes

January 29, 2023 at 11:52 a.m. EST

After two years of extraordinary stability, Joe Biden’s White House is finally getting a shakeup. As the president considers replacements for two top economic advisers — his new chief of staff has already been named — he should keep in mind the administration’s most pressing need: more technocrats.

With Republicans now controlling the House of Representatives, there aren’t going to be many new bills to sign over the next two years. In large part Biden’s legacy will be defined by the implementation of legislation that’s already passed. And by far the biggest question hanging over the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is how much of the stuff envisioned in those laws will actually get built.

Biden’s choice of Jeff Zients as chief of staff, replacing the famously politically savvy Ron Klain, is a good sign. It’s also encouraging that the top contender to replace Brian Deese, soon to depart as director of the National Economic Council, is Federal Reserve Vice Chair Lael Brainard.

Zients is a mildly controversial pick among some Democrats because of his business background. But he stands out for the nature of his experience — never having worked on Capitol Hill or a major electoral campaign, he will be a very apolitical chief of staff even while working through what will presumably be a re-election campaign.

Zients’ public sector experience has been fundamentally technical. He joined Barack Obama’s White House with the gimmicky title of chief performance officer, charged with improving the efficiency of government operations. In 2013 he was tapped to help fix botched launch of the healthcare.gov website, leading a “tech surge” that addressed the problem. He also did a fairly low-key stint as head of the NEC during Obama’s final years in office.

Biden then brought Zients back to coordinate the White House’s Covid response. At the time, the administration’s hope was that the pandemic could be swiftly crushed with the efficient delivery of vaccines, and so it hired a logistics expert. Zients did well in the job he was assigned, with vaccines rolling out to the public rapidly and smoothly once he was in charge. Unfortunately, the virus evolved and became more resistant to existing Covid vaccines. By the summer of 2021, pandemic policy became a much more muddled set of political tradeoffs that largely ended up leaving everyone unhappy.

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This helps explain why even Democrats who don’t have any big ideological objections to Zients are somewhat nervous: You can’t take the politics out of politics.

Yet there’s a strong case for a post-midterms recalibration in a more technocratic direction. Not only are there a lot of big projects to oversee, but Biden has a less technocratic temperament than Obama did.

I’ve often thought about how different America would be if Biden and his old boss could’ve somehow switched places. The US needed the backslapping dealmaker Biden as president after the Great Recession, when the economy was desperate for more stimulus by any means necessary. And it would be good if the wonkier and more cerebral Obama were president now, to shepherd the country through a bout of inflation.

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Zients, especially if accompanied by Brainard at the NEC, would offer some useful ballast. With the economy at full employment and the Federal Reserve raising interest rates, wonky “chief performance officer” stuff about efficiency matters in a way that it didn’t back in Obama’s day. The left would prefer people with deeper ties to the progressive advocacy and activist communities, but someone with critical distance is exactly what Biden needs to make sure agency rulemaking is defensible on economic grounds.

The White House is clearly trying to talk more about the strength and speed of the economic recovery, and it is largely correct that the recovery has been very rapid. But when an economy bounces back fast from a recession, it hits a point where further growth needs to come from efficiency and supply-side reforms.

It’s an unaccustomed place for the US economy. And making policy under those circumstances calls for a team of technocrats. Besides Klain and Deese, Council of Economic Advisers Chair Cecilia Rouse is also expected to be leaving soon.

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Domestic-content rules in new and old government programs, for example, should be written to maximize economic benefits in a supply-constrained economy rather than dictated by political considerations. And the federal government’s dozens of employment and training programs, many of which are targeted to specific populations, could be made more efficient. Not because economics trumps politics — but because Biden’s political success will hinge more on the results he delivers than on which groups he rewards.

Someone with a “Chief Performance Officer” mindset could work with Republicans in Congress to address these and similar issues. That’s not exactly the kind of politician Joe Biden has been for the past few years, or decades. But it’s the kind of president the US needs right now, and Biden should have a team that can support that kind of vision.