Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With Allie Bice. Send tips | Subscribe here | Email Alex | Email Tina Within the last month, Domestic Policy Council director SUSAN RICE has led behind-the-scenes meetings on legislative strategy for JOE BIDEN’s Build Back Better proposals, community violence intervention programs to prevent gun crimes, ensuring Haitian migrants are treated with “dignity” and helping to relocate Afghan refugees. Her hands are in many, many pots — from healthcare to guns to voting rights and racial equity. They are some of the most complex issues the Biden administration and the country are facing. And Rice, among the most senior Black women officials in the West Wing, is tasked with finding solutions. At the same time, she’s noticeably absent from the headlines and the cable news channels—the residue, perhaps, of a past life spent as one of the conservative media’s favorite boogeymen. “You don’t hear much about her at all. We don’t see her out as a surrogate,” said a source with close ties to the White House. “We hear a lot about the Office of Public Engagement, Legislative Affairs… [Director of Public Engagement] Cedric [Richmond] and the work that he is doing. It just seems like she’s not out there a lot.” In nominating Rice to the normally low-profile role, President JOE BIDEN said she “will elevate and turbocharge a revitalized council.” But Rice’s work, for all intents and purposes, remains almost entirely behind the scenes. There were questions about what role she’d actually play. Some major initiatives already had their own point people (a Covid council, JOHN KERRY tackling climate change). But Rice has managed to find her way through the overcrowded crew. She sees her job in the White House as low-profile and a kind of inward reflection, a source familiar with her thinking told us. And that’s all that the behind-the-scenes presence reflects, they said. For Rice, a Rhodes scholar who earned advanced degrees in international relations and built a career in foreign policy, it’s a complete 180 from her role in the last Democratic administration. Under President BARACK OBAMA , she served as U.N. ambassador and national security adviser. And she regularly appeared in public to defend the president’s foreign policy decisions, including a series of Sunday show interviews in the immediate aftermath of the Benghazi attacks that Republicans cited to sink her 2012 nomination as secretary of State. Former colleagues and longtime friends say Rice, having spent years in the foreign policy trenches, is seriously tackling her new role and venturing into new issues intensively. “You can see from the number of meetings and engagements that she is taking her post seriously,” said ERTHARIN COUSIN, who worked with Rice between 2009 and 2012 while serving as the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Agencies for Food and Agriculture. She’s also settled into her new digs — former Trump adviser STEPHEN MILLER’s second floor office in the West Wing. A March 2021 article in the New York Times noted Rice’s office was scented with sage candles. Rice subsequently tweeted a photo of the sage, a form of a smudge stick used to clear a space of negativity. The air has apparently been cleared. Rice’s office told us today she hasn’t been burning sage. She has, however, stepped into Miller’s former policy realm: immigration. She has toured border patrol and refugee resettlement facilities with Homeland Security Secretary ALEJANDRO MAYORKAS and, more recently, met with members of the Congressional Black Caucus to discuss the administration’s deportation of Haitian migrants. AUSTAN GOOLSBEE , Obama’s former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, said he saw Rice’s ability to switch to unfamiliar topics during Obama’s debate prep against JOHN McCAIN in 2008. “Susan was one of the leading figures in the preparing of that. The debate was primarily supposed to be about foreign policy, but we also needed economics. We needed a whole bunch of other domestic stuff. And that was kind of my first exposure to see her on issues that were not her thing, of national security or foreign policy,” Goolsbee said. “And she was very comfortable with those topics even then.” Goolsbee told us Rice’s venture into domestic policy would also aid her in any future political gambit. Rice in 2019 mulled a Senate run against Sen. SUSAN COLLINS (R-Maine) but ultimately decided against it, citing family and timing. "I don’t rule out running for office in the future,” she said after opting out. “In Maine or beyond.” PROGRAMMING NOTE: West Wing Playbook will not publish on Monday Oct. 11. We’ll be back on our normal schedule on Tuesday Oct. 12. We hope absence makes the heart grow fonder. Do you work in the Biden administration? Are you in touch with the White House? Are you ADITI SOMANI, special assistant for oval office operations? 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. | 
