President Barack Obama plans to nominate Jason Furman, a White House official well-versed in staff rivalries and relationships, to replace Alan Krueger, as the head of the Council of Economic Advisers, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Krueger plans to return to Princeton University to resume his teaching duties for the start of the next academic term in September, according to the people, who requested anonymity because the decision hasn’t been made final.

Installing Furman at the CEA may signal a revitalized role for the office, which has taken a back seat to the National Economic Council in driving policy inside the White House, the people said.

Furman has been the principal deputy on the National Economic Council, which coordinates economic advice for the president, since January 2009. The CEA makes recommendations to the president on economic matters and briefs him on data. Its chairman is a member of the Cabinet, and the nomination is subject to Senate confirmation.

Neither Krueger nor Furman responded to requests for comment. Amy Brundage, a White House spokeswoman, declined to comment.

The CEA chairman briefs the president on economic data, including the monthly jobs report, which the chairman typically delivers in person to Obama on the night before the data’s official release, which usually happens on the first Friday of the month.

Fed Selection

Furman may reprise a role he played in 2009 in helping the president select a replacement for Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, whose term expires at the end of January 2014.

In 2009, when Obama decided to reappoint Bernanke, Furman represented the NEC because the then-chairman, Larry Summers, was also being considered for the position.

Furman, 42, received his Ph.D from Harvard in economics in 2003. When he left the Brookings Institution in the summer of 2008 to join the Obama campaign, the move was criticized by labor unions, who questioned his advocacy for free trade and his ties to former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin.

Since joining the administration, Furman has often sided with advisers who wanted the president to push for more fiscal stimulus to promote job creation. Internally, he was a proponent for the “cash for clunkers” program to promote automobile sales as well as a proposal, known as “cash for caulkers,” to give tax credits to help homeowners weatherize their houses.

Policy Institutions

A nomination of Furman would mark the first time Obama has drawn from the Washington world of policy-research institutions instead of a university’s economic department or its business school to lead the three-member council.

The president’s first CEA chief, Christina Romer, returned to the University of California at Berkeley in 2010. His second chairman, Austan Goolsbee, returned to his position at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. Krueger is a tenured professor at Princeton.

In Obama’s second term, Furman has played a visible role in warning about the impact of the $1.2 trillion in automatic budget gets that began to go into effect March 1.

The cuts “will have macroeconomic consequences, cost hundreds of thousands of jobs across the country and jobs throughout the private sector,” Furman said a White House briefing on Feb. 25.

The job’s salary of $191,300 a year will supplement income Furman receives from the Jason Furman Trust, which has between $5,000,000 and $25,000,000 million in assets, according to Furman’s 2009 financial disclosure reports. Furman listed another account in the $5 million to $25 million range on his disclosure.

The grandson of Morris Furman, a New York City real-estate developer, Furman went to Dalton, a private high school in New York City, before receiving his B.A. at Harvard in 1992.

In the 2004 presidential campaign he worked for retired General Wesley Clark and then-senator John Kerry, who became the Democratic Party’s nominee to challenge President George W. Bush.