Biden’s Wealthiest Cabinet Officials: Zients, Lander, Rice Top the List

Coronavirus response coordinator Jeffrey Zients, science adviser Eric Lander and domestic policy adviser Susan Rice are among President Biden’s wealthiest cabinet members and senior aides, disclosures made public over the weekend show.

Mr. Zients—an investor, former Obama administration economic adviser and onetime member of Facebook ’s board of directors—listed assets worth at least $89.3 million, including between $1 million and $5 million in gold bars, millions in commercial real-estate property and tens of millions of dollars in investments.

Mr. Lander, who founded and led the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and is the holder of numerous biotech patents, disclosed assets worth at least $45.5 million. Ms. Rice, a former national security adviser and United Nations ambassador, listed assets worth at least $37.9 million.

Nominating wealthy people to serve in presidential administrations isn’t uncommon. The personal fortunes of senior members of Mr. Biden’s administration are more modest than those of some of the multimillionaires and billionaires who surrounded former President Donald Trump at the start of his administration four years ago. Mr. Trump, a real-estate mogul, emphasized bringing people with business experience into his administration, while many of Mr. Biden’s hires worked alongside him in former President Barack Obama’s administration.

Four of Mr. Trump’s top cabinet positions, including the secretaries of the treasury, commerce, education and transportation, had an estimated combined net worth of $8.1 billion. Trump economic adviserGary Cohn and Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner also disclosed hundreds of millions of dollars worth of assets when they joined the government. Penny Pritzker, who was a commerce secretary for Mr. Obama, was worth an estimated $1.85 billion at the time of her confirmation.