Austan Goolsbee is resigning as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors to return to the University of Chicago.
NYT (“Top Obama Economic Player to Return to University Post“)
Austan Goolsbee, a longtime adviser to President Obama and the only economist left on his core economic team, plans to leave as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers by September, after a year in the job, to return to the University of Chicago.
With the recovery flagging, the White House is eager to name a successor to Mr. Goolsbee this summer and is considering several academic economists, an administration official said on Monday. The job requires Senate confirmation.
“Since I first ran for the U.S. Senate, Austan has been a close friend and one of my most trusted advisers,” Mr. Obama said in a statement late Monday. “Over the past several years, he has helped steer our country out of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and although there is still much work ahead, his insights and counsel have helped lead us toward an economy that is growing and creating millions of jobs. He is one of America’s great economic thinkers.”
Mr. Goolsbee, 41, a left-of-center economist who has advised Mr. Obama since the president was a state senator, has been part of the inner circle since the earliest days of the Obama presidential campaign in late 2006. He was the chief economic adviser at the Chicago campaign headquarters and would call on outsiders on occasion for expertise; many of the Democratic economists with experience in government initially were allied with Mr. Obama’s main rival for the nomination, Hillary Rodham Clinton, because they had worked in her husband’s administration.
Mr. Goolsbee’s lack of Washington experience and his relative youth were believed to work against his getting one of the top economic posts as Mr. Obama filled his administration after the 2008 election. Mr. Obama named Mr. Goolsbee one of the three members of the Council of Economic Advisers. But when the chairwoman, Christina D. Romer, left last year to return to teaching at the University of California, Berkeley in September, Mr. Obama promoted Mr. Goolsbee to the cabinet-level chairmanship.
In that job, Mr. Goolsbee has focused on developing the economic arguments for government assistance and public-private partnerships for promoting innovation, research and development, education and infrastructure — an area he once taught about, and will do so again — even as the federal government is reducing spending elsewhere to try to rein in the growth of the national debt.
One gets the impression from that story that Goolsbee is being pushed, which would bolster the notion that Obama is absolutely ruthless in getting rid of aides who are no longer useful. But Politico (“Austan Goolsbee to leave White House“) ledes with an important piece of information that would seem to dispel that interpretation:
Goolsbee has been on leave for four years from the university’s Booth School of Business and could have lost his tenured position at Chicago, where he was a professor for 14 years before joining the administration, if he did not return, an official said.
[…]
Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is the only senior official remaining from the economic team that inherited a financial crisis and recession when Obama took office.
In the past few months, Goolsbee has been one of the few White House officials who has felt comfortable discussing economic issues on television. Colleagues say he lightens up the West Wing, and he made his mark on social D.C. when he won a “Funniest Celebrity in Washington” contest.
“While I am looking forward to returning home to Chicago, I will always be proud of the years I have spent working for this President,” Goolsbee said. “I believe that his judgment, his courage in confronting the worst economic crisis of our lifetimes, and his commitment to the American people have made a tremendous difference for the nation.”
While Obama has been in office less than two and a half years, that’s actually a very long time to stay in the pressure cooker. Yes, there’s tremendous prestige in being a top presidential advisor. But the pay is lousy, the hours are worse, and the constant scrutiny can’t be particularly attractive. That’s why the turnover in these posts is constant.
Goolsbee will be able to command much more money while living a much more comfortable life in academia. I wouldn’t be shocked, though, to see him back in government either in a second Obama term (if there is one) or the next time a Democrat is in the White House.
