By ,
Published January 14, 2015
President Bush has asked Treasury Secretary John Snow (search) to remain in office, and Snow has accepted, FOX News learned Wednesday.
Rumors of Snow's departure had been swirling in the press for a couple of weeks, but a White House official said Wednesday that Bush was happy he was staying on.
Snow had lunch at the White House with members of the president's economic team, and later met with Bush, said White House spokesman Scott McClellan.
"The president is pleased Secretary Snow agreed to continue to serve," McClellan said.
Snow has not said publicly how long he would remain in the post, but with the administration pushing for major changes to Social Security and the tax code, he would not be likely not to leave soon.
Eight of 15 Cabinet secretaries have resigned since Bush's re-election, with six replacements already nominated. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (search) said last week that he was staying put.
Snow, 65, is the former chief of railroad giant CSX (search) and a holder of a Ph.D in economics.
He has aggressively championed the president's economic policies, notably big tax cuts, on Wall Street and Main Street.
Snow took over from Paul O'Neill, who was fired in 2003 when Bush shook up his economic team during a sluggish recovery from recession, terrorist attacks and corporate accounting scandals. The nation's job market was also sputtering at the time.
During the 2004 presidential campaign, Snow traveled frequently around the country, especially to battleground states, to promote administration economic policies.
On rare occasions, though, Snow's comments caused dust-ups.
In a visit to Ohio near the end of the campaign, he said the notion that job losses were Bush's fault was a myth. That became fodder for a Kerry political ad.
Separately, he reignited the political argument over U.S. companies shipping jobs overseas with comments that "outsourcing" was an integral part of a global trading system.
Democrats used "outsourcing" as a dirty word, portraying existing corporate tax policy as encouragement to move manufacturing jobs overseas.
FOX News' Jim Angle and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
https://www.foxnews.com/story/snow-to-stay-at-treasury-department