Send tips | Subscribe here | Email Alex | Email Tina Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With help from Allie Bice. The two highest paid people in JOE BIDEN’s White House are women you’ve probably never heard of. They are: LISA HONE — who has been detailed from the Federal Communications Commission — and MOLLY GROOM — who hails from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services — are experts in their field and career civil servants. They are two of the 26 detailees serving in the executive office — 21 of whom are making six-figure salaries. Their pay carried over from their respective agencies, meaning they’re not on the White House pay scale. It’s a way for the Biden White House not to inflate its budget more than previous administrations, despite having dozens more people on staff than Biden’s immediate predecessors. Hone, a senior adviser for broadband policy, makes $183,164 a year. Groom, a policy adviser for immigration, makes $185,656. Those are the two highest salaries in the Executive Office of the President, according to a required disclosure released on July 1; a bit higher than chief of staff RON KLAIN, who clocks in at $180,000. Hone and Groom’s posts — and the salaries they earn — underscores the priorities the administration has placed on immigration and broadband. Prior to her White House assignment, Groom was the deputy chief counsel at the Office of Chief Counsel for the U.S Citizenship and Immigration Services, the same office she’s worked in since 2003. Hone was a consumer protection attorney at the Federal Trade Commission for more than 10 years. At the FCC, she helped schools and libraries get high-speed internet. Now at the White House, Hone is tasked with leading the National Economic Council’s push to expand broadband, which is part of Biden’s infrastructure plan. Biden’s proposal includes $65 billion to make high-speed broadband available and more affordable for low-income communities and communities of color. The salary disclosures are part of a yearly report that details who is working at the White House and Executive Office Building as of July 1, and how much they are making. But it doesn’t give any indication just how long these people will be there, especially advisers (cough, cough ANITA DUNN ) and those on loan from federal agencies. It also doesn’t list gender or race of the employees. And so, the Biden White House put out its own numbers, touting that women make up 60 percent of staff and that 44 percent of appointees are racially and/or ethnically diverse. All told, the data provides a snapshot of the most powerful office on the planet. And for good government groups, it’s an absolute absurdity that such data is made available to the public in the form of a PDF file, making it difficult to transfer to a searchable spreadsheet to cross-check for turnover and other ethical dilemmas. Daniel Schuman, policy director for Demand Progress, has been keeping track of White House salaries since 1997. And he’s the proud owner of a President BILL CLINTON’s staff salary list (which he got via FOIA) that features handwritten notes about racial diversity. “You should know, what are the demographics? Is there a glass ceiling for people who look a certain way or come from a particular background? Are they able to sufficiently recruit people based on diversity, both gender and race and socioeconomic status, the interests they represent?” Schuman said. “Where do these people go afterwards?... You want to have the information as data.” Inside the White House, the public disclosure of everyone’s salary could make for some uncomfortable office politics. A former White House staffer told West Wing Playbook that income wasn’t a popular topic of discussion inside the West Wing. To top aides, the title and what it conveyed was more important than the actual dollars earned, given that they all could make more in the private sector. The first report from the Biden White House shows there are more than 100 staffers making less than $62,500, roughly $10K above the average individual income in D.C., but a relatively low wage for a white collar job, given the high cost of living in the nation’s capital. “Most of the people who come there, $45,000 is more than they were making somewhere else. Or they’ve done something where the money isn’t that big of a deal,” the former staffer said. “It could be their families are wealthy or it could be that they’re doing this for two years and it’ll be a great opportunity for them to move somewhere else. Most people are willing to make a sacrifice like that.” Do you work in the Biden administration? Are you in touch with the White House? Are you THOMAS BRESLIN? We want to hear from you — and we’ll keep you anonymous: westwingtips@politico.com. Or if you want to stay really anonymous send us a tip through SecureDrop, Signal, Telegram, or Whatsapp here. | 
