By ALEXIS SIMENDINGER
Listen up, Larry Summers. President-elect Barack Obama is preparing to round out his White House Council of Economic Advisers with a second female member to work with his designated CEA chair, University of California, Berkeley macroeconomist Christina Romer.
Lost in Transition previously reported that Cecilia Rouse, Princeton University professor of economics and public affairs, was under consideration to get a CEA post, and she met with Obama in November. Rouse is now expected to become the third member of the president's council, along with Romer and economist Austan Goolsbee, an Obama campaign adviser from the University of Chicago.
The Council of Economic Advisers was created by law in 1946 to function as an objective think tank within the White House focused on domestic and international economics. During the Clinton years, economists Laura Tyson (who also chaired Bill Clinton's National Economic Council and is now global management professor at the University of California, Berkeley) and Janet Yellen (now head of the Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco) broke into the traditional parade of white males chosen to lead the CEA. Alicia Munnell and Rebecca Blank joined them as members in the 1990s.
Obama made it a point to diversify his White House staff with more women and minorities, but he ceded Romer little say in selecting the two members with whom she'll work. He named Romer -- an expert in the history of economic shocks but a political neophyte -- to become his CEA chair on November 24, announcing her role along with Treasury Secretary-designee Timothy Geithner and NEC director-appointee Summers. Goolsbee, the other CEA member, will also serve as the top staffer to Obama's new Economic Recovery Advisory Board, to be chaired by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker. Obama expects to announce other private-sector members of that board at a later date.
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