Confessions of the White House Staff Reader's Digest

Table Of Content

• White House Gender Policy Council
• Office of Cabinet Affairs
• Fact Sheet: Vice President Harris Announces Historic Advancements in Long-Term Care to Support the Care Economy
• Oval Office Operations
• Biden’s Cabinet and Senior Advisers
• Senior Advisors and Counselor to the President
• Other WHCD Guests — Including More Celebrities, Politicians and Government Staffers
• Support our journalism

Multiple generations of families sometimes work in “the house,” as they call it, and employees generally stay on for decades. Ms. Granholm, a longtime champion of renewable energy development, was confirmed by a vote of 64 to 35, with support from both Democrats and Republicans. She will be the second woman to lead the Department of Energy, after Hazel R. O’Leary, who served under President Bill Clinton. Mr. Biden picked Jake Sullivan to advise him on matters of national security. Mr. Sullivan has been hailed in Washington as a gifted legal mind, one who has a long history of working with Mr. Biden. Mr. Becerra is a Democratic former congressman and is the first Latino to serve as health secretary after the Senate confirmed him on a vote of 50 to 49.

White House Gender Policy Council

In doing so, it demonstrated hip-hop’s staying power and allowed a collective looking back at hip-hop’s many accomplishments. Hip-hop journalism and hip-hop electoral politics engagement are two significant areas that have too long remained underdiscussed. This very comprehensive documentary pushes the nation to look more deeply at what hip-hop has meant in the political arena. Bakari Kitwana, a distinguished visiting scholar in the Department of Africana and American Studies, is an internationally known cultural critic, journalist and activist in the areas of hip-hop and Black youth political engagement. Rachel Brosnahan of Marvelous Mrs. Maisel fame will join CNN's entourage on Saturday, April 27, as she prepares to enter the DC Comics Universe with her starring role as journalist Lois Lane in the 2025 Superman reboot.

Office of Cabinet Affairs

Flying with the NixonsFormer usher Nelson Pierce also remembers happy times with the Nixons before Watergate. When Pierce found out that the president and his wife were traveling to the Seattle area, where he’d been born, he told the first lady how much he missed the snowcapped mountains of the Northwest. Bowling With RichardBefore Watergate, President Nixon was well liked among the staff, although most of them agree that he and his family were much more formal and stiff than their predecessors. Chef Frank Ruta tells a story about the congenial pot washer Frankie Blair, who was a fixture in the kitchen. One night, Blair was cleaning up after the first family had finished dinner. Nixon wandered into the kitchen, and somehow they started talking about bowling—Nixon was such an avid bowler that he had a single-lane bowling alley installed in the basement under the North Portico.

Fact Sheet: Vice President Harris Announces Historic Advancements in Long-Term Care to Support the Care Economy

The salaries range from zero per year to $180,000, with the vast majority of employees making over $100,000. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is one of 24 employees who make the maximum $180,000, alongside domestic policy adviser Susan Rice and a smattering of other legal and policy advisers. Still, civil rights groups have been pushing Biden and Harris to make their appointments and cabinet level picks even more diverse. A number of officials told NewsHour that while the Biden-Harris administration is on the right path, more needs to be done. As part of the roll out, the transition team will call attention to the first set of 100-plus White House staffers, which they said is made up of 61 percent women, 54 percent people of color, and nearly 20 percent first-generation Americans.

Biden administration touts most diverse White House staff in history - NBC News

Biden administration touts most diverse White House staff in history.

Posted: Fri, 30 Jun 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]

Oval Office Operations

I met the White House lifers while working as a speechwriter for President Barack Obama. For the past four years, I have spoken with dozens of lifers, former and current, about how they survived the Trump Presidency. I came to understand that the White House does not shed the identities of past Presidents so much as it accumulates them, abides them up to a point, and, ultimately, waits them out.

The president said the White House will host an official transition event next week to thank Klain and to welcome Zients back to the White House as chief of staff. According to 2019 Census estimates, roughly 18 percent of the U.S. population is Hispanic or Latino. According to Shanks, the shift in relations between the First Families and lifers has changed the feeling of the White House. “The Obamas and the Trumps were the first Administrations when the residence was considered the upper floors and not the entire building. For us, it’s always been that the ‘home’ was from ‘basement to the sniper on the roof,’ ” Shanks said.

General Austin, 67, was for years a formidable figure at the Pentagon and the only African-American to have headed U.S. Central Command, but he is less known for his political instincts and has shown little interest in the public-facing parts of the job. He made history as the first African-American to lead the Defense Department. He worked for the department under two previous administrations, including as deputy secretary of state under President Barack Obama. The White House Office is an entity within the Executive Office of the President of the United States (EOP). The White House Office is headed by the White House Chief of Staff, who is also the head of the Executive Office of the President.[1] The staff work for and report directly to the president, including West Wing staff and the president's senior advisers.

By the end of the morning, they had set out the Bidens’ family photographs and stocked the kitchen with the family’s favorite foods. The White House chief of staff is the head of the Executive Office of the President of the United States, a cabinet position in the federal government of the United States. Available positions on the White House residential staff are filled by word of mouth, with employees bringing in, and vouching for, new hires.

Speakers disputed the university's account that 15 people were injured and one hospitalized, saying the number of people taken to the hospital was higher. One student described needing to go to the hospital after being hit in the head by an object wielded by counter-protesters. The crowd continued to grow as the night wore on as more and more officers poured onto campus. Outside the encampment, a crowd of students, alumni and neighbors gathered on campus steps, joining in pro-Palestinian chants. A group of students holding signs and wearing T-shirts in support of Israel and Jewish people demonstrated nearby.

He faces a daunting task in tackling the coronavirus pandemic, which has taken a particularly devastating toll on people of color. Judge Garland has extensive experience working for the department he has been selected to lead, having served under three former presidents — Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He also approaches the role with considerable knowledge of the judicial system informed by his work as a former clerk for Justice William J. Brennan Jr. on the Supreme Court and now on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, where he was chief judge from 2013 to 2020. The issues that confront the United States at any one time cannot be dealt with by the president alone, and therefore the president draws on the expertise of others in the administration and even within an administration as one chief of staff may differ from a predecessor or successor. The highest-paid staff member was Francis Collins, a detailee serving as acting science advisor to the president.

Eighty-four staff members earned an annual salary of $150,000 or more, 27 of whom received a salary of $180,000 or more. Over seven million seniors and people with disabilities, alongside their families, rely on home and community-based services to provide for long-term care needs in their own homes and communities. This critical care is provided by a dedicated home care workforce, made up disproportionately by women of color, that often struggles to make ends meet due to low wages and few benefits.

Nixon asked Blair if he would play with him, and the two of them bowled until two in the morning. “There may have been a bottle of Scotch involved as well,” Ruta adds. An earlier version of this article overstated the breakthroughs Miguel A. Cardona achieved as a top education official. He served as Connecticut’s first Latino commissioner of education; he would not be the first Latino to be confirmed as Secretary of Education. Since January, Ms. McCarthy has served as the president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group.

Zients' background is in management consulting and business leadership, and he's spent about two decades in the private sector. Zients worked at the consulting firm Bain & Company, and served as CEO and chairman of the The Advisory Board Company. He also served on the boards of Facebook, Children's National Medical Center and Sirius XM Radio, according to his Obama-era biography. The Biden team would not provide a breakdown of White House staffers by more specific race and ethnicity categories. But, a NewsHour tally of publicly released names found that about 40 percent of the staffers are women of color, about 20 percent are African Americans and roughly another 20 percent are Hispanic. We are no longer supporting IE (Internet Explorer) as we strive to provide site experiences for browsers that support new web standards and security practices.

Throughout his bid for the presidency in 2020, Mr. Buttigieg drew criticism for his relatively limited political credentials, running as a small-town mayor while losing some support over his handling of police brutality and other issues during his tenure. Mr. Biden selected him over other prospective candidates with more direct experience overseeing major urban transportation networks and public transit agencies. A longtime champion of renewable energy development, Ms. Granholm, 61, is widely credited with steering Michigan through the 2008 recession and working with the Obama administration on the subsequent bailout of the automobile industry, which included clean energy investments. Mr. Mayorkas faces the challenge of rebuilding an agency that suffered from unfilled vacancies and a chain of interim leaders in recent years. It has also been embroiled in scandal over, among other issues, the Trump administration’s family separation policy.

Those who worked in the residence “were local people, family members—somebody was always a cousin of somebody else on staff.” When Monkman started, during the Johnson Administration, segregation was still fresh in people’s minds. “I heard many stories about segregated lunchrooms for the residence staff—they were integrated in the fifties,” she told me. “Even when I started, in the late sixties, it wasn’t so integrated in terms of the roles people played. For a long time, African-Americans were butlers, maids, and housemen, versus the engineers, electricians, painters, and carpenters, who were white. Bit by bit, they were hired into the trades.” The distinction meant that white workers often had control of their whereabouts, whereas Black workers had to sit at the ready, to be summoned upstairs at any moment. The lifers’ constancy is useful in a house where the occupants change every four to eight years. Originally, Presidents paid the staffers’ wages, but in the nineteenth century, when the lifers’ ranks grew, Congress began paying their salaries instead, solidifying their status as fixed employees of the house.