Finally: A Bain Man Makes It To The White House

Ron Klain’s former Bain consultant Jeff Zients will succeed him as White House Chief of Staff Getty Images

President Joe Biden’s new chief of staff, Jeff Zients, is a centimillionaire businessman who, like the failed Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, got his start as a consultant at Bain Consulting. (For Romney and Bain: in Biden’s tellingThat was just one stop along the road to putting Americans in power. “through hell and back.”)

Ron Klain’s replacement will be Zients in February. The former head of The White House’s COVID response, Zients amassed a vast fortune working for Bain & Company and other management consulting firms. But at Bain, according to the Wall Street Journal, Zients “fell in love with Bain’s culture, teamwork … and analytical rigor.” At age 35, his net worth was estimated to be close to $150million.

Irony runs rampant in Zients’s appointment. Biden’s role in the 2012 presidential election, when he served as former president Barack Obama’s running mate, was to attack Romney, the Republican nominee. Like Zients, Romney’s business career began at Bain & Company. He then became CEO of Bain Capital. 

Biden’s outrage was not directed at Zients’ association with Bain, but Romney’s wealth and association with Bain. The then-vice president of the United States accused Romney of untrustworthy business practices during campaign stops. This was in an attempt to portray him as untrustworthy. Biden claimed that Bain Capital was partly responsible for the decline of domestic manufacturing in the last half century.

“There’s Romney economics, which says as long as the government helps the guys at the very top do well, workers and small businesses and communities can be left to fend for themselves,” In May 2012, Biden spoke to an Ohio audience. “You’ve been through hell and back. Outsourcing. Padlocked plants. How many times have you opened your newspaper to find out another factory was closing down? And you probably knew someone who worked there too. Or maybe it was you.”

Zients’s financial disclosures It is clear that he has invested a substantial amount of his wealth in gold as a traditional hedge against inflation. He holds as high as $5 million worth of gold bars and as high as $25 million in security linked to gold’s value. Inflation has reached a 40 year high under Biden.

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