Anna Fifield in Washington, On Tuesday November 8, 2011, 1:44 pm EST

Barack Obama’s White House is undergoing a transformation as he prepares for a bruising re-election campaign, with the president seeking to make the West Wing run more efficiently at the same time as he battles a weak economy and a hostile Congress.

The latest change comes with Bill Daley, White House chief of staff, handing over day-to-day staffing issues to Pete Rouse, his deputy who was once Mr Obama’s chief of staff in the Senate.

The White House sought to play down the move, which was widely seen in Washington as a demotion for Mr Daley, a former JPMorgan Chase executive who was brought in early this year partly to repair relationships with Wall Street.

Mr Daley had asked Mr Rouse “to take on an expanded operational and co-ordination role” with the White House staff, a senior administration official said. Mr Daley was adding responsibilities, not subtracting them, she said, but was unable to say what new tasks he would take on.

The changes to Mr Daley’s job are being viewed as unusual because he is not leaving. A friend of Mr Daley’s said that he intended to stay until Mr Obama’s first term ends in January 2013.

Since he started in January, Mr Daley has been blamed for a series of negotiating failures with Republicans on Capitol Hill. Some have been relatively trivial – such as failing to co-ordinate with Speaker John Boehner’s office on the day Mr Obama would make a speech to Congress – but others have been more damaging.

Mr Daley has been criticised over the way he ran negotiations with Republicans during efforts to raise the US’s borrowing limit over the summer, which led to a last-minute temporary fix after weeks of bitter battles.

Analysts said it was significant that the move, which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, came almost one year before the election.

“We’re now just at the point where the president and his chief of staff need to look the senior people in the eye and say: ‘Are you with us until the election or not?’,” said Bill Galston, a former Clinton administration official now at the Brookings Institution. “If not, the time for them to bail out is now, not in four or six months,” he said.

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> Numerous White House officials have left to work on Mr Obama’s re-election campaign, including former senior West Wing officials David Axelrod, Jim Messina and Julianna Smoot, who are now running the campaign in Chicago. Stephanie Cutter, another senior adviser, will join them by the end of the year.

Meanwhile, Bill Burton, former deputy press secretary, is running Priorities USA, a new Democrat fundraising group.

Other senior officials have moved onto new positions – including Rahm Emanuel, Mr Daley’s predecessor who is now mayor of Chicago, and Mona Sutphen, Mr Emanuel’s deputy who moved to UBS. Melody Barnes, Mr Obama’s domestic policy adviser, will leave before the end of the year.

Former officials say such turnover is natural given the high pressure and long working hours that working in the White House involves – not to mention the opportunities for better pay in the private sector.

Mr Rouse is a low-key but highly regarded adviser who served as Mr Obama’s chief of staff between Mr Emanuel’s departure and Mr Daley’s arrival, and said that he did not want the job permanently. Mr Rouse has such a long history on Capitol Hill that he is often referred to as the “101st senator”.