Lawrence H. Summers dominated economic thought in Washington, on both sides of the aisle, for the better part of four decades. He launched his policy career in Ronald Reagan’s White House before advising Democrat Michael Dukakis’s presidential campaign, then became the World Bank’s chief economist, held senior positions in the Clinton and Obama administrations and counseled President Joe Biden.
He also maintained a close friendship with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Summers and Epstein kept up months-long email exchanges over several years — including about Summers’s attempt to court an economist nearly 30 years his junior — until the day before Epstein was arrested on charges of sex-trafficking minors in 2019.
Those messages, disclosed last week as part of a congressional inquiry into Epstein, have threatened to end Summers’s career. Now some of his longtime colleagues say they are struggling to reconcile his economic and intellectual prowess with the decisions that ultimately caused his downfall. Summers has not been implicated in sexual wrongdoing, but the evidence of his friendliness with Epstein shocked many of his erstwhile allies.
Summers, 70, has stepped down from a litany of nonprofit policy groups in recent days and left the board of OpenAI, the firm behind ChatGPT. Harvard University, where he once served as president and holds the school’s highest faculty designation, launched an inquiry into people named in the Epstein documents. Summers said this week he would not be teaching anymore this year.
In a statement Monday, Summers said that he was “deeply ashamed of my actions and recognize the pain they have caused,” and that he was “stepping back from public commitments as one part of my broader effort to rebuild trust and repair relationships with the people closest to me.”
Through a representative, Summers declined to comment Thursday for this article.
President Donald Trump, who also had a years-long relationship with Epstein that ended in the early 2000s, well before he took office, ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate the financier’s ties to Summers and other prominent people and institutions. Last week, she tapped Jay Clayton, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, to conduct the inquiry. Clayton ran the Securities and Exchange Commission during Trump’s first term, and his Manhattan-based office, under different leadership, prosecuted Epstein on charges of sex trafficking.
In the wake of the emails, the world that Summers shaped is rapidly trying to turn the page on him. But his influence in Washington will persist, even if politicians stop taking his calls: His ubiquitous presence aided an alliance between Democratic presidents and Wall Street and led the U.S. to embrace the globalized trading alliances that Trump is now trying to tear down.
Summers, allies and adversaries alike said in interviews, was a consistent presence who helped leaders keep the economy on an even keel. He was also a brash, arrogant, imperious figure, the same people said, who threatened to publicly derail presidential agendas and demanded seats at crowded tables, or else.
Biden and some aides sought Summers’s advice on economic policy throughout their tenure. In certain scenarios, the president and his top aides saw Summers as a ringer, uniquely capable of persuading skeptical moderate Democrats to back White House plans. But when he disagreed with them, he was known to bellow over the phone at advisers and insist on audiences with senior officials or Biden himself, according to two former Biden aides, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional reprisals. White House officials became accustomed to emails from Summers ordering them to call him quickly for a debate over the phone before he appeared on a TV news show — otherwise, he’d tell the viewing public Biden was steering the country down the wrong track.
“He has a talent for having the ear of many influential people,” said one former Biden administration official.
Summers was one of the Biden administration’s harshest Democratic critics. He blasted its nearly $2 trillion rescue plan for worsening inflation and overstimulating the economy. He said the country would probably see a major slowdown and spike in unemployment before prices got back under control. And he did so constantly, appearing nonstop on television and media interviews.
His predictions were wrong: The annual inflation rate dipped below 3 percent by the end of Biden’s term without a recession.
The attacks were especially biting because they came from a Democrat and longtime associate of much of Biden’s team, people familiar with the matter said. But there was an underlying element of respect and recognition — a sense that Summers was motivated by genuine policy disagreements and not political jabs. A number of senior officials said they considered him a friend or mentor.
Further to the left, though, that sentiment was replaced by conspicuous loathing. Progressives accused Summers of using his White House experience to cultivate lucrative — and cushy — private-sector connections.
Summers served as President Bill Clinton’s treasury secretary, then head of President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council. For some of the time between, he earned $5.2 million a year advising hedge fund D.E. Shaw, according to financial disclosures. He earned an additional $2.7 million in speaking fees in 2008 for dozens of appearances before he joined the Obama administration, the disclosures showed.
He offered counsel on cryptocurrency investment concerns and joined the board of OpenAI in 2023, publicly advocating a light regulatory approach to artificial intelligence.
“Any effort to stop this or to just slow it down for the sake of slowing it down without also thinking about its positive development,” he told Bloomberg News in 2024, “would be to cede the field to the irresponsible, would be to cede the field to potential adversaries of the United States, would be to cede the field to those whose vision of AI might be as a tool of totalitarianism rather than as a tool of human emancipation.”
Summers joined OpenAI’s board during the tumultuous, but temporary ouster of CEO Sam Altman a year after the company launched ChatGPT. OpenAI’s directors at the time had voted to remove Altman after top deputies raised concerns that he had manipulated employees, pitting them against each other. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)
During tense negotiations to rehire Altman, the board members who voted against him resigned; they were replaced by Summers and veteran tech executive Bret Taylor.
“This needs to be a corporation with a conscience,” Summers told Bloomberg TV shortly after joining the board. Paraphrasing his late Harvard colleague, the economist Ken Galbraith, Summers said, “conscience is the knowledge that somebody is watching,” a phrase he has invoked many timesover the years.
“I think Larry’s primary role is not as an economist or a wonk or an expert,” said Sarah Miller, who chairs the board of the American Economic Liberties Project, a progressive research and advocacy group. “It’s about gatekeeping the power of the insiders that he himself has so famously talked about, who have access to big donors and money, powerful people on Wall Street and corporate America, and big, big media platforms sitting alongside the prestige that institutions like Harvard University offer.”
At Harvard, people were also grappling with the Summers fallout.
He and his wife, Harvard professor Elisa New, briefly visited Epstein’s private island during their 2005 honeymoon, which the Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, first reported and a Summers spokesperson confirmed. (In a statement Thursday, New said she was “deeply sorry for maintaining contact” with Epstein and called his actions “horrific.”)
Summers had weathered previous controversies at Harvard. The most noteworthy ended with him resigning the university presidency in 2006 after he said “intrinsic aptitude” could explain why fewer women have excelled in science and math than men. He apologized multiple times for the comments, but other ongoing disputes with faculty led him to step down.
He remained in the classroom at Harvard on and off until this week.
Lecturing to students about “multilateralism and its future” after the Epstein emails were made public, Summers began class by saying: “Some of you will have seen my statement of regret expressing my shame with respect to what I did in communication with Mr. Epstein and that I’ve said that I’m going to step back from public activities for a time, but I think it’s very important to fulfill my teaching obligations. And so, with your permission, we’re going to go forward and talk about the material in the class.”
Students almost immediately called for his resignation. Summers is “a towering figure” who “has served at the highest echelons of American political and intellectual life,” three students wrote in an opinion piece Wednesday for the Crimson. “But Harvard must hold its faculty to basic moral and behavioral standards.”
Stripping Summers of his status as a “university professor,” the school’s top faculty distinction, might not mean much to the outside world, said Richard Bradley, the author of “Harvard Rules,” a book about Summers’s tenure as president of the university, but it would send a clear message within Harvard.
“These are people who are seen as titans,” Bradley said. The way they “comport themselves matters.”
Slater reported from Williamstown, Massachusetts. Shayna Jacobs in New York, Nitasha Tiku in San Francisco and Susan Svrluga in Washington contributed to this report.
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