By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
The New York Times
WASHINGTON — The White House said Tuesday that Lawrence H. Summers, the chief architect of President Obama’s economic policy, would leave at the end of the year, continuing an exodus of top-level advisers at a time when voters are expressing deep dissatisfaction with the president’s stewardship of the economy.
Doug Mills/The New York Times
President Obama with Timothy F. Geithner, left, and Lawrence H. Summers in March 2009.
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Summers to Leave Obama’s Economic Team This Year(September 21, 2010)
Encounter: Larry Summers’s Evolution (June 10, 2007)
Times Topic: Lawrence H. Summers
The White House says the departure has been long-planned; Mr. Summers, 55, said in a brief interview that he must return to his professorship atHarvard by January to keep his tenure. His departure gives Mr. Obama a chance to reshape his economics team after the midterm elections, when Republicans are expected to gain strength and possibly reclaim the majority in Congress.
A brusque and brilliant economist and one-time Harvard president, Mr. Summers directs the president’s National Economic Council, and runs Mr. Obama’s daily Oval Office briefings on the economy. He has guided the president through an extraordinarily tumultuous time, on matters ranging from the $787 billion economic stimulus package to the financial regulatory reform bill passed this year, to the current fight with Republicans about whether to extend Bush-era tax cuts.
“There’s a time and a place for everything. It’s been my plan long term,” to return to Cambridge, Mass., Mr. Summers said. As to the administration’s economic record, he said, “I think history will judge that a profound crisis that might not have been contained was contained.”
But with unemployment at 9.6 percent, Republicans have been sharply critical of Mr. Summers. In a recent speech, the House Republican leader, John A. Boehner of Ohio, called for both Mr. Summers and Timothy F. Geithner, the Treasury secretary, to be fired. Tuesday’s announcement came amid intense speculation about the future of both men; the White House confirmed Mr. Summers’s plans after Bloomberg News first reported them.
A senior administration official said on Tuesday that Mr. Geithner expected to stay on. But other top economics advisers are already gone. Peter R. Orszag quit as budget director earlier this year, and just this month Christina D. Romer, the administration’s chief economics forecaster, left to return to teaching at the University of California, Berkeley. And Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, is contemplating leaving to run for mayor of Chicago, adding to the expectation of a postelection shake-up.
“We are on a better path thanks in no small measure to Larry’s wise counsel,” Mr. Obama said in a statement on Tuesday. Just one day earlier, the president brushed off a question about the futures of both Mr. Summers and Mr. Geithner, saying he thought they both were doing an outstanding job.
“This is tough, the work that they do,” Mr. Obama said then, during a televised question-and- answer session on CNBC. “They’ve been at it for two years. And you know, they’re going to have a whole range of decisions about family that’ll factor into this as well.”
Republicans have been running for election on the theme that the midterm elections are a referendum on the economy, as Mr. Boehner told business leaders in Cleveland last month. He said Mr. Obama’s team lacked “real-world, hands on experience,” a direct shot at Mr. Summers’s career as an academic.
News of Mr. Summers’s departure set off speculation that Mr. Obama would replace him with a corporate executive to counter the impression that he is antibusiness. His exit will undoubtedly expand the influence of Mr. Geithner and also of Austan Goolsbee, a longtime adviser to the president who was recently named to replace Ms. Romer. Jack Lew, the new budget director — he held the same position under President Bill Clinton — is also emerging as a powerful voice, especially as the president puts more emphasis on cutting the federal deficit.
Such changes are natural for an administration at the halfway point, especially in the current era, when working at the White House can be a taxing grind. Still, the rearranging will undoubtedly be watched closely for evidence of policy shifts or a so-called “midcourse correction,” especially if the election is as devastating for Democrats as many analysts expect.
“I wouldn’t call it a shake-up,” said David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser. “I think the nature of administrations is that they evolve, and you’ll see some people will stay and some new people will come in, and they’ll have different styles and different approaches, and they’ll bring different strengths.”
With his suffer-no-fools manner and sharp-edged management style, Mr. Summers has not always won friends; in 2005, as Harvard president, he caused an uproar with impolitic comments about women, and was eventually forced to resign as president after a vote of no-confidence by the faculty.
But he rehabilitated himself as valuable counselor to Democrats. After Mr. Obama was elected, he persuaded Mr. Summers — who had served as Treasury secretary for Mr. Clinton — to take the lower-profile job of running the National Economic Council, a job that some thought might be beneath him.
He greatly expanded the role by establishing the daily economics briefing, which he controlled and ran. Early on, he ruffled feathers, disagreeing with Mr. Geithner — to whom he had been a mentor — and Ms. Romer, although those differences seemed to abate over time. There was also widespread speculation that he wanted to be chairman of the Federal Reserve, a job he did not get when Mr. Obama reappointed Ben S. Bernanke.
“We prevailed on Larry to take a job that generally someone who has been secretary of the Treasury would not have taken, and we did it because it was an extraordinary time and we needed that expertise and that insight,” Mr. Axelrod said. “But everyone knew that he couldn’t stay indefinitely. He ended up staying longer than anybody expected.”
Mr. Summers told Mr. Obama at the end of last year that he wanted to leave, but the president asked him to stay on, and he agreed, said an administration official who asked for anonymity because the conversations were private.
Mr. Summers’s wife remained in Cambridge — they have school-age children and did not want to relocate — and he had been commuting there on weekends, the official said.
At Harvard, where Mr. Summers holds the prestigious title of university professor, his colleagues predicted he would liven up the campus and said they would be happy to have him back — so long as he did not take a management job.
“Larry is always a source of lively argument and ideas,” said Theda Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology who had been one of Mr. Summers’s toughest critics, adding, “The Summers presidency ended quite a long time ago, and everybody at Harvard has long since moved on.”
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