Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With help from Allie Bice. Send tips | Subscribe here | Email Alex | Email Max Every July, many White House officials quietly click on the same link: a publicly disclosed salary list featuring all their colleagues. “It’s a fascinating little ecosystem,” said one White House official. “Between this and Legistorm [on Capitol Hill], people are just constantly checking each other's salaries.” Here are some things we noticed and White House officials told us: 1. KEISHA LANCE BOTTOMS MAY NOT STAY LONG The former mayor of Atlanta makes $50,000 less than her predecessor CEDRIC RICHMOND as the head of the office of public engagement — he made $180k to her $130k — and does not share his former designation as an “assistant to the president.” West Wing Playbook asked the White House why, and an official said Lance Bottoms is classified as a special government employee. That means she technically is a temporary worker limited to 130 days — although there are exceptions to that complicated classification. So it’s possible Lance Bottoms’s tenure may be brief. 2. SPECIAL ASSISTANT POLITICS The bottom rung on salaries is full of “special assistants.” There are more than a dozen of them and almost all get paid $49,056 a year. But three special assistants are exceptions to that rule, signaling which offices have juice in the building. We aren’t naming names but the special assistants for the head of the Domestic Policy Council, SUSAN RICE, and National Economic Council director BRIAN DEESE each make $63,875. So does the special assistant to the first lady’s chief of staff. JILL BIDEN’s first chief of staff was sworn in as ambassador to Spain last July and her role was never filled so we asked what that special assistant has been doing. The First Lady’s office didn’t respond. “White House salary structure includes pay bands for all White House staff, which is a best practice for helping to achieve pay equity,” a White House official said in a statement. “Each pay band is associated with a set of skills and competencies and staff pay is commensurate with the level of skills they possess at the time of hire.” 3. BHARAT GETS A BUMP In 2021, NEC deputy director BHARAT RAMAMURTI was paid $25,000 less than other deputy directors and was a “special assistant to the president” (SAP) rather than a “deputy assistant to the president” (DAP). No longer! Ramamurti now gets paid what the other deputy directors made last year and his title got bumped up to a DAP. 4. SAP v. DAP Another trend we noticed is that while all the DAPs make the same salary ($155,000), the SAPs mostly are divided between making $130,000 or $110,000, depending on their office. 5. THE GREAT DETAILEE DIVIDE A near constant frustration cited by White House staffers is that they often make much less than their counterparts at agencies and departments throughout the administration. The top salary for White House personnel is $180,000 but that is definitely not the top salary within the executive branch. That discrepancy can sometimes contribute to a White House brain drain. But it can also lead to awkwardness when workers from Cabinet departments are temporarily detailed to the White House – a common practice. For example, the second highest paid person on the communications team isn’t the deputy communications director but rather the new senior communications adviser for policy, RACHEL THOMAS, on detail from the Department of Education. She makes over $50,000 more than the White House deputy communications director. The strange system also means some White House staffers make more than chief of staff RON KLAIN and the other top Biden administration aides, who all make $180,000. The senior policy advisor for transportation, LUISA PAIEWONSKY, makes $191,300, for instance. And the highest paid person in the White House is FRANCIS COLLINS, who makes $300,000 a year as the acting science adviser. 6. DOWNSIZING The White House has fewer staffers than it did a year ago. It employed 524 people last year – not including their unpaid commissioners charged with considering Supreme Court reforms – and 474 this year. That’s more in line with past White House staffing, whereas the previous year appeared to be a record, based on past disclosures. Last year, we called that “bloated” but some Biden insiders reached out to us afterward to argue the White House should increase the staff count by several times given its decision-making has become increasingly centralized in the White House. A White House official said in a statement: “The reduction in employee count was driven primarily by offboarding staff who were brought in explicitly temporary roles at the beginning of the administration (it is a typical practice temporary staff in the first year as an Administration gets situated) along with the ending of the Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States.” TEXT US — Are you CAROLINE POESE, a White House senior records management analyst? We want to hear from you! And we’ll keep you anonymous if you’d like. Or if you think we missed something in today’s edition, let us know and we may include it tomorrow. Email us at westwingtips@politico.com or you can text/Signal/Wickr Alex at 8183240098. MEA CULPA: In yesterday’s newsletter, we bungled the name of the mayor of Montgomery, Ala. His name is STEVEN REED. Our apologies to Mayor Reed.
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