Christina Romer said she will resign as chairman of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) to return to her teaching post at the University of California at Berkeley, effective September 3, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
Romer is the second member of Obama’s economic team to leave. White House budget director Peter Orszag left earlier this summer. She said she is returning to California so the youngest of her three children can begin high school there.
Romer, 51, was a high-profile salesperson for the Obama economic program — and was considered successful at that mission, in part because of her Midwestern sincerity and plain-spoken style.
The post, she said in an interview Thursday, “was definitely as hard as I thought it ever would have been.”
“I never anticipated the amount of the contact I’d have with the president,” she added. “If anyone had told me that I’d meet the president of the Free World every day, I never would have believed it.”
As CEA chair, Romer was one of the key economic advisers who met with the president on an almost daily basis to help chart the response to the deepest recession since the Great Depression.
Obama praised Romer’s “extraordinary service,” in a statement Thursday.
“Christy Romer has provided extraordinary service to me and our country during a time of economic crisis and recovery,” the president said.
“The challenges we faced demanded more of Christy than any of her predecessors, and I greatly valued and appreciated her skill, commitment and wise counsel.”
Romer has been mentioned as a possible successor to Janet Yellen as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Yellen was nominated to be vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board in Washington.
Romer also will join the president’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, which is chaired by former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker. Among the candidates to succeed her at the CEA is Austan Goolsbee, who is on leave from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.