WASHINGTON — Two senior aides to President Obama plan to leave the White House in the coming weeks, officials said Wednesday, creating an exodus of talent and institutional memory from the West Wing as Obama looks toward the final two years of his term.
Dan Pfeiffer, one of the last members of Obama’s intimate circle of aides who had been with him since his White House run, plans to depart by early next month. Jennifer Palmieri, his communications director, will leave sometime this spring to join the nascent presidential campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton.
The exits will follow that of a top adviser, John D. Podesta, the presidential counselor who has already announced he will step aside and is widely expected to advise Clinton should she seek the presidency. His final day will be Feb. 13.
Taken together, the resignations mark a transition for Obama, as public attention increasingly turns to the 2016 race to replace him and he turns toward the last chapter of his presidency without some of his most trusted lieutenants.
Administration officials said there had been no decisions about who would replace Pfeiffer as a senior adviser, or about how to compensate for the loss of a confidant whose longevity and closeness to the president are increasingly rare at the White House.
Pfeiffer informed Obama of his plans last month aboard Air Force One bound for Boise, Idaho, the day after the State of the Union address. Although the visit was intended to highlight Obama’s new domestic initiatives, Pfeiffer’s announcement turned the trip into a nostalgia tour of sorts for the president and other top aides who were traveling with him, as they reminisced in the presidential limousine about the days leading up to his victory in the Iowa caucuses in 2008.
Denis R. McDonough, Obama’s chief of staff, said Pfeiffer would be missed at the White House for his “very keen ability to see the arc of the president’s story, and why the president got into this to begin with.”
“You’re losing a lot of institutional memory, and that’s a concern,” said David Axelrod, a predecessor to Pfeiffer as one of the president’s senior advisers. “He has lived every minute of it with the president, and with the team, and I think, as a result, fundamentally understands what Obama is about — what the sensibilities are that animate him.”
The group of veterans is now whittled down to just a few, including McDonough; Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser and confidante; and Anita Decker Breckenridge, deputy chief of staff, who has worked with Obama since 2003 when he was in the Illinois state Senate.