
As she had been on the campaign, senior adviser Anita Dunn is a top decision-maker and helps shape messaging. Feldman is a longtime policy guru who knows how Biden thinks so well, some joke she knows Biden policy positions before he does. Ricchetti is constantly in touch with members of Congress and outside power brokers. Both Reed and Ricchetti have long histories and share a deep trust with the president. He’s intensely involved in scores of issues from briefing members of Congress to schmoozing progressives to filtering vast amounts of information before he brings it to the president.ĭonilon is known as “the Biden whisperer” and often one of the last people Biden consults before making major decisions. “They’re technocrats who understand politics - that’s a powerful combination when it comes to government.”Īt the top of the power heap is Klain, the current chief of staff whose philosophy is less about putting out fires but stopping them before they begin. LaBolt added that the experience of the people Biden put around him is paying off.
#White house with copy space professional
“I think here you see people who are 100 percent focused on addressing a national crisis and not professional positioning. “Part of Biden’s promise during the campaign was to lower the temperature and not treat the presidency like a reality show and that’s a promise he’s delivered on,” said Ben LaBolt, a former Obama official who is also close to the Biden White House. “They used to say ‘no drama Obama’ but honestly this White House is even more devoid of that,” said one White House official who also worked in the Obama administration. There’s little infighting or even signs of internal disagreement. He’s done it in a way so drama-free, it couldn’t be more antithetical to his predecessor. He’s taken myriad actions, big and small, using executive orders, the bully pulpit and Congress. Biden has befuddled critics and pleased progressives. The top-down management style has sometimes muddled efficiency, with aides complaining that the upper echelons of power demand the most basic of decisions go through them, including advance team communications.īy and large, however, it is working. That’s in part because high-ranking Biden appointees weigh in in even some of the lowest-level hiring decisions. Hiring remains stubbornly sluggish across the board, frustrating those in the administration. Others concede that the heavy-handedness is mucking up the works. Exhaustion is setting in amid a punishing - and relentlessly serious - remote work regimen, with little opportunity for the levity breaks of past White Houses. Still, some aides complain Biden is kept in too much of a bubble, one where few people can get his ear outside of a cadre of loyalists he’s cultivated for decades. There’s a personal loyalty and a desire for him to be successful at a gut level, as Americans, but also as people who love him.”

“Some of that comes from the fact that there are a number of people here who have worked for him for decades. “Everybody feels driven to get things right and do right by Joe Biden,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in an interview. But it is also one where there is competition to show proximity to the boss and occasional difficulty in moving agenda items along in a timely manner. The result is a unit that doesn’t leak (at least not that often) and that stays on script (most of the time). One hundred days into the Biden administration, the White House is a tight ship defined by insularity, internal power centers and top down micromanagement - interviews with nearly two dozen people across the administration, including senior White House officials, reveal.
