Biden names his White House chief of staff. What to know about Ron Klain
President-elect Joe Biden on Wednesday announced he’s selected Ron Klain to serve as his White House chief of staff when he takes office in January, Biden announced in a statement.
The Associated Press and other media outlets named Biden the projected winner of the presidential election on Saturday, and the former vice president has since started planning his transition of power — this week naming a 13-member COVID-19 advisory task force and members of agency review teams.
Choosing a chief of staff is typically the first big decision for a president-elect, ABC News reports. Biden is expected to announce other selections for his Cabinet later this month.
Who is Ron Klain?
He previously served as Biden’s chief of staff when Biden was President Barack Obama’s vice president.
Klain spearheaded the Obama administration’s response to the Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa and was considered a “leading contender” for White House chief of staff before being selected for the position due to the “urgent need” to handle the coronavirus pandemic, ABC News previously reported.
“You can’t prove the counterfactual. But Ron Klain is a lot of the reason why we didn’t have an Ebola epidemic here,” Valerie Jarrett, an Obama adviser, told the Atlantic in May. “There is nobody I can imagine who’s better situated to advise Vice President Biden on COVID-19 right now than Ron Klain.”
In the United States, four people were diagnosed with Ebola and 11 were treated for it, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Before working as Biden’s chief of staff, Klain served as former Vice President Al Gore’s chief of staff, as chief of staff to former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno and as associate White House counsel in charge of judicial nominations during former President Bill Clinton’s administration, according to The New York Times.
He was also a senior adviser for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, ABC News reports.
Klain previously worked with Biden when the president-elect was chairperson of the Senate Judiciary Committee — serving as his chief counsel from 1989 until 1992 — and worked as a senior adviser on his 1988 and 2008 presidential campaigns, the statement from Biden’s transition team says.
“Ron has been invaluable to me over the many years that we have worked together, including as we rescued the American economy from one of the worst downturns in our history in 2009 and later overcame a daunting public health emergency in 2014,” Biden said in the statement.
The chief of staff role
The White House chief of staff is in charge of the Executive Office of the president’s staff and serves as a policy adviser to the president, according to Ballotpedia.
The job involves managing the flow of information to the president, choosing and hiring staff and managing the president’s schedule.
Chief of staff is a “crucial” role, according to the White House Transition Project.
“The chief must understand the political landscape of the country in order to give the president honest advice on policy,” Ballotpedia says. “The chief of staff needs to be able to negotiate with Congress and the executive Cabinet as well as donors and supporters.”
The role has “common elements” across administrations but varies based on “different presidents’ ideas work styles and beliefs about how the White House should operate,” the project says.
This story was originally published November 11, 2020 at 5:06 PM with the headline "Biden names his White House chief of staff. What to know about Ron Klain."
