President Obama with his two Treasury secretaries, Tim Geithner and Jack Lew. (Wikimedia Commons)

Lew gained the support of 20 Republicans in addition to almost all Senate Democrats. Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont was the lone no vote in the Democratic caucus, with three Democrats absent.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, Lew has identified his main goals in the job as comprehensive tax  and entitlement reform and pushing China to float its currency.

A former director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Bill Clinton, Lew reprised that role in the Obama administration from 2010 until his promotion to become the president’s chief of staff.

Lew, a former Citigroup executive who banked over $1.1 million working at the firm between 2006 and 2009, according to the Washington Post, had been grilled by some Republican members of the Senate over his duties and compensation at the firm. Citigroup received bailout money from American taxpayers as part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, more commonly known as TARP, which was approved by the George W. Bush administration near the peak of the 2008 financial crisis.

Despite the fact that the U.S. actually made a profit of about $12 billion on its $45 billion investment in Citigroup and on the bailout program as a whole, to say nothing about its effect on stabilizing the free-falling world economy, a Bloomberg poll taken only three months before the government recouped its full investment in Citigroup found 60 percent of voters believing most of the money had been lost.

Lew’s association with Citigroup, and his perceived loyalty to big banks, had been the biggest obstacle in his path toward becoming Treasury secretary.

Reach Executive Producer Matt Pressberg here.