Jeffrey Dunston Zients (/ˈzaɪənts/; born November 12, 1966) is an American business executive and a government official who served as the 31st White House chief of staff from February 2023 to January 2025 under U.S. president Joe Biden.

Earlier in the Biden administration, he served as counselor to the president and White House coronavirus response coordinator from January 2021 to April 2022.

[1][2][3] During the presidency of Barack Obama, Zients served as director of the National Economic Council from February 2014 to January 2017, served as acting director of the Office of Management and Budget in 2010 and from 2012 to 2013, and led the emergency effort to fix healthcare.gov after the troubled launch of that critical component of the Affordable Care Act.

Zients joined the Biden administration after taking leave from his position as chief executive officer of Cranemere, an investment firm.

[8][15] Zients founded and was the managing partner of Portfolio Logic LLC, an investment firm primarily focused on health care and business services.

[25][26][27] Following the error-plagued launch of healthcare.gov on October 1, 2013, Obama and White House chief of staff Denis McDonough asked Zients to take charge of fixing the website.

The position of the White House was that Zients's stake in PSA Healthcare, a pediatric home health business, was not a conflict of interest.

The rule was strongly criticized by Wall Street leaders and business groups and was struck down by a federal appeals court in 2018.

[43] In summer 2020, Politico reported that Saguaro Strategies, a media and consulting firm, heavily edited Zients's Wikipedia article as he became more prominent in the Joe Biden 2020 presidential campaign.

[45] The absence of any comprehensive COVID-19 vaccine distribution plan at the time of the handover from the outgoing Trump administration became an urgent priority for Zients after the inauguration on January 20, 2021.

[47] In March 2022, Zients announced he would be leaving the Biden administration in April, to be succeeded as Coronavirus Response Coordinator by Ashish Jha.

[1] On February 8, 2023, following President Joe Biden's State of the Union Address the previous night, Zients took office to become the 31st White House chief of staff.