Current Position: Federal Chief Performance Officer (since June 2009)
Credit: Thomas Heath/TWP
Why He Matters
You can call him President Obama’s weed-wacker. But instead of trimming the front yard, Zients is tasked with removing the ineffective and irrelevant programs run by the federal government.
As Obama makes room for health-care reform and economic stabilization initiatives, he has created the chief performance officer (CPO) to ferret out waste, and eliminate it, inside the federal budget. Zients will work in Peter Orszag’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and fill the dual role of OMB’s deputy director for management.
Zients wasn’t Obama’s first choice for CPO; McKinsey & Co. Senior Director Nancy Killefer withdrew her nomination in February 2009 after her failure to pay some employee payroll taxes became public knowledge.
Zients has never worked in government, but he has a long history of leading companies. He shepherded two companies from private practice to public ownership, started his own private-equity firm and helped lead the successful effort to move the Montreal Expos to Washington, D.C. But his group’s inability to seal the deal on the Expos’ sale left Zients managing his company, Portfolio Logic, and available to join the administration.
At a Glance
Current Position: Federal Chief Performance Officer (since June 2009)
Career History: Founder of Portfolio Logic (2004 to present); Partner of the Washington Baseball Club (2004 to 2006); CEO of the Advisory Board (1998 to 2004)
Birthday: N/A
Hometown: Kensington, Md.
Alma Mater: Duke University (political science)
Spouse: N/A
Religion: N/A
DC Office: N/A
State/District Office: N/A
Email N/A
Web site
Path to Power
A product of Kensington, Md., Zients grew up as an avid baseball fan. As a child, he would pore over classified ads and garage sales in order to find a new treasure to add to his massive baseball-card collection. By the time he went to college, he had built up $30,000 worth of valuable baseball cards. Unfortunately, his athletic talent did not match his enthusiasm for sports, so Zients instead led the sports desk at his high-school paper.
For college, Zients attended Duke University. He then moved to Boston to work at Bain & Company before heading back to the D.C. area to join the Advisory Board in 1992.
The Advisory Board
When Zients first joined the DC-based consulting and research company, it was a small private firm offering advice to health-care businesses. Zients joined the Advisory Board as a lieutenant to the company’s owner and founder, David G. Bradley. By 1996, Zients had become the company’s chief operating officer; two years later, he advanced to the chief executive position. The year before taking over the CEO role, Zients and Bradley were discussing the future of the company over coffee at Roy Rogers. Bradley confessed to Zients that he wanted to sell the company for double what it was worth. “Jeff said, ‘I think I know how to do that,’” said Bradley.
Zients wanted to spin-off the Advisory Board’s fastest-growing business, its corporate consulting arm, and take it public. The Advisory Board would continue to service health-care clients while remaining privately-held, but the firm’s Corporate Executive Board division would handle corporate consulting and go public. Although Zients had never led an initial public offering, the Corporate Executive Board successfully went public in February 1999, raising $155 million. Then in 2001, the group decided to take the Advisory Board public, raising another $90 million. These moves propelled Zients onto Fortune magazine’s richest Americans under the age of 40, with a reported net worth of $149 million in 2002.
In June 2004, Zients stepped down from the Advisory Board to head the Washington Baseball Club, which led the efforts to lure a baseball team to the Washington, D.C. area. After the Montreal Expos announced it would move to D.C., Zients headed a failed attempt to purchase the team in 2006. In 2004, Zients also created Portfolio Logic, a private equity firm that invests in private health-care firms, among other businesses. He continues as its managing director, pending Senate confirmation.
The Issues
One of the key posts that Obama created in his new administration was the chief performance officer. Slated to be housed in the powerful OMB offices, the CPO will sift through the federal budget to decide which government programs are irrelevant, inefficient and outdated. This daunting job originally went to McKinsey & Co. Senior Director Nancy Killefer. But in February 2006, Killefer suddenly resigned once it became public that she had failed to pay some employee taxes for household workers. This left the president without a CPO for the first four months of his administration.
In April 2009, the search for Killefer’s replacement ended when Obama announced Zients as his CPO choice. The CPO announcement came two days before Obama’s first all-Cabinet meeting in which he ordered the group to collectively trim $100 million in costs from their budgets within 90 days.
With major health-care and economic stabilization plans dominating the administration’s 2010 budget request, Zients’ role will be crucial to the success of Obama’s legislative agenda. “As surely as our future depends on building a new energy economy, controlling health-care costs and ensuring that our kids are once again the best educated in the world, it also depends on restoring a sense of responsibility and accountability to our federal budget,” said Obama when announcing Zients’ nomination.
Washington Nationals Ownership Bid
In mid-2004, the baseball franchise Montreal Expos had very few fans and even less revenue; in February 2002, the Major League Baseball Association (MLB) had to purchase the franchise just to keep it alive.
But the MLB wanted to find a new home city for the Expos and an ownership group to purchase the team. Washington, D.C. quickly moved up the list of possible cities with the help of the Washington Baseball Club, a private investor group formed in 1999 to attract a professional baseball team to the nation’s capital. Zients, a life-long baseball enthusiast, joined the Washington Baseball Club in June 2004 as the group’s president and chief executive. In September 2004, the MLB finally decided that the Expos would move to D.C., and Zients’ duties quickly changed from enticing a ball club, to actually raising the funds to purchase the new team.
The idea of a Washington ball-club was attractive to several big investors, but the final decision came down to a group led by Bethesda, Md. developer Theodore N. Lerner or a group led by Zients and his partner, Washington businessman Frederick V. Malek. The Malek-Zients team had the inside track because their group helped bring the team to Washington in the first place. They had the support of Washington Mayor Anthony D. Williams (D) and a diverse management group that included former Secretary of State Colin Powell and attorney Vernon Jordan. Lerner’s group was not close to the District government, nor did it represent the D.C. population. But the Lerner family did have money, and a last ditch effort to ease MLB’s concerns, including courting some minority partners, led to the MLB Commissioner Bud Selig’s decision to give the rights to the Expos — now known as the Nationals — to the Lerner family in May 2006.
The Network
Zients works in the OMB office with OMB Secretary Peter Orszag.
Zients tenure at the Advisory Board coincided with the Obama administration's chief technology officer Aneesh Chopra, who he will work with at the OMB. Zients will also be working closely with Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra.
During his time with the Washington Baseball Club, Zients led a team of investors that included President George W. Bush’s Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Campaign Contributions
Zients has donated just over $90,000 since 1999, almost all of which went to Democratic candidates. However, there are two exceptions. Zients donated $500 to former Sen. Mike DeWine (R-Ohio) in 2003 and $2,000 to Sen.
Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) in 2005. Zients did not donate to either presidential candidate in 2008, but he did give $4,500 then-Sen.
Obama (D-Ill.) from 2004 to 2006.
