(CNN) - Weighing in on President Obama's choice for chief of staff, the progressive organization MoveOn.org criticized William Daley for his close ties to "big banks and big business."
"With Wall Street reporting record profits while middle class Americans continue to struggle in a deep recession, the announcement that William Daley, who has close ties to Big Banks and Big Business, will now lead the White House staff is troubling and sends the wrong message to the American people," Justin Ruben, executive director of MoveOn.org said in a statement.
Ruben said it's up to Daley to prove he's "not carrying water in the White House for the big banks that took our economy over the cliff."
The former commerce secretary and Chicago native most recently ran the Midwest operations for the investment bank JP Morgan Chase and formally accepted the top White House post Thursday.
In a statement Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO said he hoped the economy would be a top priority for Daley.
"The president is of course entitled to choose a chief of staff in whom he has complete confidence," Trumka said. "Yet President Obama and his Administration will ultimately be judged by results - whether the economy recovers robustly and begins to generate good jobs on the scale needed to improve the lives of working people."
A statement from Public Citizen, a liberal nonprofit public interest organization said the decision represented "the wrong direction" because of Daley's ties to Wall Street.
"This is exactly the wrong direction for the administration, which seems intent on drawing exactly the wrong lessons from the 2010 elections," Public Citizen president Robert Weissman said in a statement. "What the public wants is meaningful action on jobs and an end to the insider, corporate deal-making arrangements that William Daley represents."