Washington, Jan 10: US President Barack Obama has announced that White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley is resigning after a year on the job to return to his family in Chicago.

Speaking at the White House, Obama said the resignation “was not easy news to hear” and that he only accepted it last week after asking Daley to take a day to reconsider.

Daley, 63, a former Clinton administration official, made the surprise decision to stand down less than 12 months into a tenure which saw growing frustration as the President’s agenda stalled in Congress, The Telegraph reports.

Current White House budget director, Jack Lew, will replace Daley in February, the report said.

Lew, who worked in both the Clinton administration and as a deputy to Hillary Clinton at the State Department, will be Obama’s third full-time Chief of Staff in three years.

Daley had received much of the blame for the collapse of debt negotiations last year. In an earlier interview Daley said that the political and economic climate of the first three years of the Obama administration had been “brutal” and “very, very difficult.”

“On the domestic side both Democrats and Republicans have made it very difficult for the President to be anything like a chief executive,” he had said at that time.

Obama, however, praised him for his role in the killing of Osama bin Laden and orchestrating a temporary cut in payroll taxes and thanked him for his “extraordinary friendship and loyalty”.