As President Obama plans to reshuffle his cabinet, the job of running the Treasury Department could fall to Google’s old CEO, Eric Schmidt, or Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg.
White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew is the favorite to replace Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, but Obama aide Pete Rouse is looking for “a Fortune 500 CEO” to work under the president who embraced Occupy Wall Street.
“Much of Rouse’s attention has been focused on trying to find a Fortune 500 CEO to recruit, such as Larry Fink of BlackRock, Tony James of the Blackstone Group and David Cote of Honeywell or even Eric Schmidt of Google,” Politico reports today. “Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg’s name comes up — Obama clearly likes her, and she served as chief of staff at the department under Larry Summers.”
Schmidt, whom Obama installed on his Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, was reportedly at the Obama campaign headquarters when the president visited his staff on election day. And Google employees combined to form the third-highest source of campaign donations to the president.
