Obama Nominates Three for Assistant Treasury Secretary Posts

President Barack Obama will make nominations for three assistant secretaries of the Treasury, where Secretary Timothy Geithner’s efforts to revive the economy have been hampered by vacancies in top posts.

Alan Krueger is the choice for economic policy, the White House said. David Cohen will be assistant secretary for terrorist financing and Kim Wallace for legislative affairs. Each currently serves as counselor to Geithner.

“With the leadership of these accomplished individuals and our whole economic team, I am absolutely confident that we will turn around this economy and seize this opportunity to secure a more prosperous future,” Obama said in a statement released by the White House yesterday.

The nominations still leave Geithner without any Senate- confirmed staff at the most senior levels of deputy and undersecretary as he tries to flesh out plans to remove bad loans from banks’ balance sheets. Geithner’s effort to staff his department received a new blow last week with the withdrawals of two potential nominees.

Former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission member Annette Nazareth took herself out of the running to be Geithner’s deputy after concern about public scrutiny over her SEC work and frustration at the length of the selection process. International Monetary Fund official Caroline Atkinson pulled out of consideration for the Treasury’s top international job.

Princeton Professor

Krueger, the nominee for economic policy, is a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University. He previously served as chief economist at the Labor Department and holds a doctorate in economics from Harvard University.

Cohen until recently was a partner in the Washington law firm WilmerHale, where he focused on complex civil litigation, white-collar criminal defense and anti-money laundering counseling. He previously worked in Treasury as acting deputy general counsel and associate deputy general counsel.

Wallace was a managing director at Barclays Capital and head of its Washington Research Group. Before that he was a managing director at Lehman Brothers Inc. Wallace also worked as a legislative aide specializing in fiscal policy for then-Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell and as an analyst on the Senate Budget Committee.

Geithner has brought in some high-level aides to work in posts that don’t require Senate confirmation, including Gene Sperling, a former head of the White House National Economic Council under Clinton, and Lee Sachs, a former Clinton Treasury official. During the administrations of Clinton and George W. Bush, some top Treasury positions went unfilled for months.