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Jeffrey Zients, who is reportedly slated to become President Joe Biden’s next chief of staff, has a long history of allegedly accumulating wealth via questionable business practices and helping guide federal healthcare policy. Zients most recently served in the Biden White House from the president’s inauguration until April of 2022 as Coronavirus Response Coordinator. Prior to that, Zients was involved in the leadership of several healthcare companies that were forced to pay millions of dollars in fines for alleged Medicare and Medicaid fraud, as first reported by the American Prospect....

Supplies of Johnson & Johnson’s one-dose coronavirus vaccine will be extremely limited until federal regulators approve production at a Baltimore manufacturing plant under scrutiny, the White House’s pandemic response coordinator said Friday. With allocations of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine set to plunge by 86 percent next week, governors across the country warned that the loss of the supplies they were counting on would set back their vaccination drives, which have used the shot in more transient, isolated and rural areas where the one-dose vaccine has appealed to many Americans. The other two vaccines, made by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, continue...

Two top aides to President Obama hailed his “year of action” as a success Monday, saying the president took more than 80 executive actions without Congress to help the middle class. National Economic Council Director Jeffrey Zients and Domestic Policy Council Director Cecilia Munoz said in a blog post that Mr. Obama will try to work the the new Republican Congress next year, but will also “continue to use every authority available to make progress through executive actions” in 2015.

President Obama will name a new individual to oversee the ObamaCare website after the departure of Jeffrey Zients at the end of the year, the White House said Monday. "That is an important role and we have seen in the way that Jeff has worked in that role that kind of management position needs to be filled," press secretary Jay Carney said at his afternoon briefing. Zients was appointed last month to oversee repairs to the website after a botched rollout plagued by technical glitches prevented many consumers from purchasing coverage through the ObamaCare exchanges. But before taking the position,...

Senate Democrats vented their frustrations over the faulty rollout of the Affordable Care Act in a meeting Thursday with White House chief of staff Denis McDonough and other senior officials. “There’s a lot of frustration, everywhere,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said after the meeting. McDonough tried to assure angry senators he is personally taking charge of the disparate federal offices in charge of implementing the massive law, which has been plagued by technical errors. “He gave us the impression that he’s taking charge of the different elements and cracking the whip. He said to let him know if we had...

Please Blue Fairy. I beg of you to fix the ObamaCare website by the end of November or we will all look like complete fools. Please Blue Fairy. Those EVIL Rightwingers will laugh at us now and forever unto the end of time if the ObamaCare website is not fixed. Blue Fairy, wave your magic wand and make it all better for us. Blue Fairy, wave your magic wand and stop the ObamaCare Death Spiral. Blue Fairy, wave your magic wand and let me just wake up and find out this whole ObamaCare fiasco is just a silly nightmare....

WASHINGTON — The man in charge of fixing the Obamacare portal says HealthCare.gov will be up and running by “the end of November.”Jeffrey Zients, a former top White House official pulled back into government to lead a so-called “Tech Surge” to fix the Obamacare enrollment website, told reporters Friday that the site will be fully functional by the end of next month.“By the end of November, HealthCare.gov will work smoothly for the vast majority of users,” Zients said.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew said Wednesday that there was "no evidence" a political appointee was involved in the IRS' targeting of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status. In his first network broadcast interview since taking office in February, Lew told "CBS Evening News" anchor Scott Pelley that an investigation has shown "there has been no evidence of any political decision making in the IRS." Asked whether any political appointee had oversight of the decisions that were made around the tea party applications, Lew said, "There has been no evidence of anyone in a political position having been involved in any...

July 24, 2013 Coons denies knowledge of or involvement with O’Donnell tax breach Ben Wolfgang As unanswered questions swirl around Christine O'Donnell and the breach of her personal tax records, the other key figure in Delaware’s 2010 U.S. Senate race said neither he nor his campaign had anything to do with it. Democratic Sen. Christopher A. Coons, who handily defeated Ms. O'Donnell three years ago in the contest to fill Vice President Joseph R. Biden's Senate seat, says he hasn’t been contacted by congressional investigators or the Treasury Department watchdog responsible for looking into the improper use of Americans’ private...

Today, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew gave an interview to Scott Pelley.  In the clip below, he attempts to bat aside the IRS targeting scandal by asserting that there's "no evidence" any political employee was involved in the targeting. It sounds good, of course -- but his "no evidence" formulation, designed to suggest the administration's innocence (i.e., that "no evidence" exists), means only that investigators have so far been prevented from uncovering all the facts.  When a key witness takes the Fifth; the President's hand-picked new IRS chief misleadingly "reports" that lefty groups were targeted, too; and Democrats seek to attack...

A top former Obama Cabinet member who met with IRS officials at the White House during the targeting scandal is currently out of the country, a White House source told The Daily Caller. Former acting Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Jeffrey Zients has still not returned from an overseas exile that began after his departure from the Obama administration in April, two weeks before the IRS scandal broke. Zients met with then-IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman and Shulman’s political aide Jonathan Davis and spokesman Frank Keith at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building at the White House complex on April...

Guy Benson calls this "the political quote of the year", but it may be more like the defining moment of Obamanomics and Barack Obama's fiscal policies. Paul Ryan destroyed interim OMB chief Jeffrey Zients in testimony before Congress this week already, deconstructing White House claims to have $2 trillion in deficit reduction over the next ten years when their contribution to that effort was only $400 billion, or roughly $40 billion a year. In this five-minute clip, Ryan points out that the budget he proposed last year actually eliminated deficit spending over the long term, while the budget Obama proposed...