On a cold, gray February afternoon, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen stepped out of the West Wing wrapped in a puffy black parka and clutching a folder of documents, seemingly oblivious to the Washington custom of having an aide schlep the paperwork. Viewed as an outsider to partisan politics, she now has a place in President Joe Biden’s inner sanctum, a Ph.D. economist who does the reading, knows the numbers and treats her staff as peers rather than underlings. Yellen, entourage in tow, had been at the White House to strategize about how to push through Biden’s proposed $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief plan — a package that could determine how quickly the U.S. economy heals, how the Democrats fare in the midterm elections and just how much Americans can trust the government to solve the nation’s toughest problems. The House passed the package Saturday, sending it to the Senate. As a former chair of the Federal Reserve, Yellen carries the authority of a public servant who has already helped steer the economy back to health once and now has been called back at age 74 for an encore after former President Donald Trump declined to offer her another term as chair. She is framing the need for the giant COVID-19 bill in starkly human terms, applying a lifetime of research and thought to the challenge of recovering the jobs lost to the pandemic at a record clip. And her credentials are enough to give pause to Republican lawmakers and other economists who argue the package is so big it would overwhelm the economy. “Yellen is uniquely poised,” said Brian Deese, director of Biden’s National Economic Council. “She has as much experience and expertise of addressing the challenges of our time as any living economic policymaker today. She doesn’t have a steep learning curve.” Even in a Washington riven by partisanship, Yellen is held in high regard by members of both parties. As president of the San Francisco Fed, she sounded the alarm about the housing bubble before it fully burst in 2008, triggering the Great Recession. She helped nurse the economy back to health as the Fed’s vice chair and then as chair sustained the longest expansion in U.S. history by holding interest rates near historic lows. During Yellen’s confirmation hearing, Republican Sen. Mike Crapo of Idaho opened his questioning by saying how much he appreciated her public service: “We had a good working relationship while you were at the Fed and I look forward to developing and continuing that good working relationship.” Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, who considers Yellen to be one of his best former students and her husband, George Akerlof, to be one of his best friends, said she is a rarity in the nation’s capital. “We should think about it as a compliment to Biden that he wanted somebody who was a technocrat,” Stiglitz said. “She’s a very bright, congenial, humorous and nice person, a combination which is very unusual in Washington.” Yellen’s hard-won credibility is now staked on administering a dose of financial adrenaline and mass vaccinations that can bring back the 9.9 million jobs lost to the pandemic within the next two years. That would be an unprecedented burst of hiring. By contrast, it took a grinding six-plus years to recover the jobs lost […]

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