"Obama's Choice for Chief Performance Officer Withdraws Name" (with video)

WaPo, with video from MSNBC (06:18):

Nancy Killefer, the management consultant and former Treasury official who had been picked by President Obama to serve as the country's chief performance officer, has withdrawn from consideration for the post, White House officials confirmed this morning.

Officials in the White House refused to say why she has withdrawn her name, but they said more details will come later in the day.

Shortly after her appointment, the Associated Press reported that Killefer had a tax lien placed on her house by the D.C. government because of a failure to pay unemployment taxes on household help. Since then, administration officials refused to answer questions about the tax error, which she resolved five months after the lien was filed, the wire service said.

Killefer was nominated by Obama in early January to be deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget, which requires Senate confirmation, and appointed at the same time to a new White House post, chief performance officer for the entire federal government.

Obama had said Killefer would work on "identifying where there are areas that we can make big change that lasts beyond the economic recovery plan and save taxpayer money over the long term." It was not immediately clear who would replace her.

The White House has been struggling this week to explain how two of its Cabinet nominees -- former Senate majority leader Thomas A. Daschle and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner -- failed to pay back taxes. A third senior official with tax problems may have proved too much for the White House, which had prided itself on carefully vetting nominees, to stomach.

Killefer is a senior director at McKinsey & Company, an international management consulting firm with private- and public-sector clients. From1997 to 2000, served as assistant secretary for management and chief financial officer and chief operating officer at the Treasury Department.

At McKinsey -- where she worked before joining Treasury, and after her stint there -- she has consulted with the retail, hotel and pharmaceutical industries on management, marketing and efficiency issues.

Killefer also chaired the IRS Oversight Board from 2001 to 2005 and has served on the board of the Partnership for Public Service since 2006.

She has drawn wide praise from colleagues.

"She's a very talented person and we have a lot of important issues that she was going to be charged with addressing," Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service said this morning. "My hope is that the Obama administration works with great dispatch and works to find someone with her caliber, who will give as much prioritization to the matter as the president was giving these issues."

When Obama named Killefer to the post in early January, Stier said she was a top pick because she had excelled both in the private and governmental sectors.

"The translation to government is a challenging one," Stier said then. "What Nancy brings is a wealth of experience of working in the government on management issues. That combination of expertise from the public and private sectors will be what she needs to draw on to do a very challenging job."

During the presidential campaign, Obama proposed the creation of a "SWAT team" composed of "top-performing and highly-trained government professionals" that would work with government agency leaders and the Office of Management and Budget to eliminate government waste and improve efficiency.

"The CPO will work with federal agencies to set tough performance targets and hold managers responsible for progress," according to the campaign proposal. "The president will meet regularly with cabinet officers to review the progress their agencies are making toward meeting performance improvement targets."

Howie P.S.: Last night, when the focus was still just on Daschle, Tweety had to talk football before allowing his guests to wonder if Daschle was another "indispensable" nominee, like Geithner, who deserved "special treatment." On Countdown, the theme was is Daschle an "exception to change?"

Barack Obama