Last year Vice President Kamala Harris made headlines for the chaotic level of turnover in her office, and former President Donald Trump inspired countless media lectures about leadership after his staffing shakeups.
In April 2018, Harvard Business Review ran a headline called “Why Staff Turnover in the White House Is Such a Bad Thing — Especially For President Trump.”
Now, President Joe Biden is dealing with his own turnover problem… and his White House is trying to spin the turnover as a positive story about the job market.
Resignations have been announced the White House complex this month — and this dynamic serves as more evidence that not even the White House is immune from what has been called “the great resignation” as employers struggle to fill vacancies and workers jump to new jobs at record rates.
For example, new White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was delivering her third on-camera goodbye to a departing staffer in less than 24 hours when she quipped to reporters,
“Every day I’m going to doing these little goodbyes, but I promise we will have a press shop.” She added, “Not everyone is leaving.”
Take a look —
Karine Jean-Pierre says she'll be saying goodbye to White House staff "every day."
"I promise we will have a press shop. Not everyone is leaving." pic.twitter.com/lQd6P1voRS
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) June 2, 2022
The Biden administration is undergoing a period of unusually high staff turnover as President Joe Biden nears 18 months in office. Long hours, low morale and relatively low pay are taking a toll on both the ranks of the senior staff and the more numerous junior aides who keep the White House functioning.
It’s not unusual for staff to turn over at this point in a presidency, but the swiftness of the change has been stark at times: Two-thirds of the White House press shop, much of the COVID-19 response team, two of the deputy counsels to the president, even the staffer who manages the White House Twitter account are all leaving within a few weeks of each other.
Some of it is by design. As is customary, White House staff were told to leave by July or to wait to depart until after the November elections, according to current and former officials.
Plus, the Biden White House staffing was more stable than many predecessors in its earliest days, making the recent and upcoming exits more noticeable.
The full scale of the Biden turnover will not be clear until the end of the month, when the White House is required to submit its annual salary report to Congress.
Biden aides insist the departures are not tied to the president’s low poll numbers, but instead reflect a natural transition for staffers — some of whom also toiled long hours on the campaign — looking to improve their quality of life. The aides emphasized that replacements have been secured for most of the departing staff and that no critical roles are going unfilled.
“It’s a normal time for this level of turnover in any administration,” said White House spokesperson Emilie Simons. “Government service involves sacrifice, and staff often have young children or promising careers in the private sector they put on hold, or opportunities for advancement within the administration or through graduate school.”
Many of the departing aides are heading to federal agencies, which have far deeper pockets than the smaller Executive Office of the President. They can often double their salary and substantially reduce their workload.
In many ways the departures echo a broader trend in the economy — which the Biden White House has championed — where a historically tight labor market has given workers abnormal leverage to seek stronger-paying jobs that are more compatible with their post-pandemic lifestyles.
More than 4 million workers have been quitting their jobs each month over the past year, according to Labor Department data reviewed by the Associated Press. In other words, almost 3 percent of all workers are reportedly their leaving jobs each month — most for other work opportunities.
“It’s a worker’s market right now,” then-White House press secretary Jen Psaki said last year, months before leaving herself for a role at the news outlet MSNBC. “We know that. People are looking for more dependable benefits. They’re looking for wages that are higher.”
The White House has bristled at the term “great resignation” and has tried to reframe it as what Bharat Ramamurti, the deputy director of the National Economic Council, calls the “great upgrade.”
Congress sets the budget for the Executive Office of the President, and that budget has remained largely flat even as costs have gone up, including some driven by the coronavirus response.
Biden also expanded the staff when he entered the White House, owing in large part to the centralization of the federal COVID-19 response and climate policy within the West Wing. The 2021 report showed an average salary of about $94,000. That’s 40% higher than the country’s median household income, but still less than what the well-credentialed staff could earn in the private sector.
“White House salaries tend to be well below the salaries that people have before they come into the White House,” said Kevin Hassett, former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Trump administration. “This follows naturally from the fact that a president can choose people who are at the top of their professions. So when people return to their outside profession, the salary likely increases for almost everybody.”
Veterans of previous West Wings who serve in or are in contact with Biden administration officials say there is a notable lack of joy across the White House complex, the AP reported.
The pandemic has reportedly diminished some of the benefits of the job that typically make the demands of the work more bearable for them.
“These aren’t perks in the superficial sense, but they’re moments that build your team, sharpen focus on the mission, and recharge your batteries,” said Eric Schultz, principal deputy White House press secretary at the end of the Obama administration. “Nobody goes to the White House to coast, but the jobs are draining, so inspiration along the way can mean a lot.”
The pandemic meant few birthday parties in the bowling alley in the bowels of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and curtailed the opportunity to give loved ones a tour of the historic workplace. In December, the White House was unable to hold staff holiday parties because of COVID-19, and travel is only just returning to pre-pandemic norms. For Biden’s first year in office, most staff could not even stand on the South Lawn driveway to view the president arrive or depart on Marine One.
The COVID precautions around the 79-year-old president, including testing for those who might encounter him daily, mean many staff members have few personal interactions with their boss. For some departing staff, a highlight of their time in the White House came when former President Barack Obama visited the White House and talked with staff on the anniversary of the Affordable Care Act. Aides said he spent almost five hours in the building and made a point of mingling with staff — in many cases spending more time with them than Biden has been able to.
Biden, aides said, has restarted one pre-pandemic tradition: accommodating departure photos for staffers and their families who are leaving the administration.
Take a look at this old photo of an Oval Office departure ceremony, hosted by Biden’s former boss —
https://twitter.com/ObamaNostalgia/status/1377874561975341057
The Horn editorial team and the Associated Press contributed to this article.