Summers to Leave Obama’s Economic Team This Year

Summers to Leave Obama’s Economic Team This Year
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: September 21, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/22/business/22summers.html?_r=1&hp


The chief architect of President Obama’s economic policies, Lawrence H. Summers, will leave the White House and return to his position as a professor at Harvard, the administration announced Tuesday.

The departure of the outspoken Mr. Summers, who served as director of the White House National Economic Council, marks a major shakeup in Mr. Obama’s economic team. In July, the budget director Peter R. Orszag stepped down and at the beginning of September, Christina D. Romer ended her stint as chairwoman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Only Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner remains from Mr. Obama’s original top-tier economic team.

“Over the past two years, he has helped guide us from the depths of the worst recession since the 1930s to renewed growth,” Mr. Obama said of Mr. Summers, adding that he would continue to offer advice on an informal basis and had agreed to serve as a member of the President’s Economic Advisory Board. His planned departure was first reported by Bloomberg News Tuesday.

The administration announced the news Tuesday afternoon after it began trickling out in the media. Earlier in the day, the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, had refused to confirm reports of Mr. Summers’ departure.

Mr. Summers had served as President Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary but left in 2001 when he was appointed president of Harvard. There he found himself embedded in a controversy about his management style. He joined the Obama administration in 2009 as the chief architect of economic policy.

“I will miss working with the president and his team on the daily challenges of economic policy making.” Mr. Summers said. “I’m looking forward to returning to Harvard to teach and write about the economic fundamentals of job creation and stable finance as well as the integration of rising and developing countries into the global system.”

To succeed Ms. Romer, the president promoted a longtime economic adviser, Austan D. Goolsbee, to chairman of his Council of Economic Advisers. To succeed Mr. Orszag, who left in July, the president has nominated Jack Lew, who has been a deputy secretary of state and was a budget director in the Clinton administration.

Faced with unemployment that has hoovered near 10 percent and an increasingly disillusioned voter over the administration’s economic policies, Republican leaders in Congress, and a few endangered Democrats have sought to distance themselves from the White House before the midterm elections.