Turns out that 2020 was a good year for Obama.
Obama reunion? Biden fills Cabinet with former WH leaders (read all about it)
WASHINGTON (AP) — President-elect Joe Biden is getting the old gang back together.
Increasingly deep into the process of selecting Cabinet members and other senior staff, the incoming Biden administration has a distinctly Obama feel.
There’s Denis McDonough, former President Barack Obama’s chief of staff who Biden
announced on Thursday would be nominated as the secretary of veterans affairs. Susan Rice, Obama’s former U.N. ambassador and national security adviser, was named the director of Biden’s White House Domestic Policy Council.
That’s on top of Biden already
tapping Obama’s agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack, to head the department once again, former
Secretary of State John Kerry to serve as special envoy on climate and Kerry’s Obama-era deputy Antony Blinken to lead the State Department. Jeff Zients, who did stints as acting Office of Management and Budget director and a top economic adviser in the Obama White House, will return as Biden’s coronavirus response coordinator.
With the exception of President Donald Trump, a political outsider when he was elected in 2016, recent new presidents have relied heavily on pools of talent that had cut their teeth in their parties’ previous administrations to fill out their own government. But Biden, who is assuming the presidency in the midst of the worst public health crisis in a century and a flagging economy, is putting a greater premium on past experience and, as a result, has gone frequently back to the Obama well as he fills out his government.