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 Eli | Email Lauren Every White House reporter has been there. You send a text to a White House staffer, only for it to bounce back with a red exclamation point, indicating it failed to reach the recipient. As West Wing Playbook wrote about early in JOE BIDEN’s presidency, the Biden White House is the first in history to embrace texting as a mode of communication. But not all White House staffers have been granted texting permission on their government-issued phones. Most of Biden’s senior staffers, including press aides who regularly talk to reporters, are able to text from their work phones. But the more junior crop of advisers, as well as officials from the offices of the first lady and second gentleman, don’t have the same privileges. And in a city obsessed with status and perceived power, who can — and cannot — text from the White House is now one more job status differentiation. Some former White House officials pushed back on the idea that texting was now seen as a status symbol inside 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. — the digital equivalent of who had the closest office to the Oval. They noted that texting privileges are mostly given to press staff so that they could be more responsive to reporters and that many junior White House staffers, such as press assistants, also are able to text from their work phones. Those doing the push back, notably, all were able to text. Other former staffers said texting wasn’t necessary to get the job done, especially considering that Outlook email is widely used. Plenty of White House staff also use their personal phones for work-related issues, although they are still supposed to preserve those messages for official record keeping. The issue of who texts and why has taken on greater import as texting has grown more common as a form of communication. The White House, as is the case for most technological matters, has taken a bit to get up to speed. Past administrations did not want to deal with figuring out how to allow staffers to text from their government phones while also complying with public records laws. And so, they didn’t allow it. That changed under the Biden administration, which installed a software program on government-issued cell phones that automatically archives text messages so they can be preserved like paper documents or emails. “For the sake of responsiveness and engagement, select White House staff, including certain members of the communications and press teams, are allowed to text for official business. Those texts are preserved, consistent with the Presidential Records Act,” a White House spokesperson told West Wing Playbook (via email), without providing a list of who can text. So why not just let everybody text? There are security reasons for limiting the size of that universe, said JOHN PESCATORE, a director at the security research organization SANS Institute, who used to work at the National Security Agency and at the Secret Service. Even so, the White House mostly uses SMS messages to communicate as opposed to iMessage. While SMS messages are easier to keep records of, they are less secure than iMessages and are more susceptible to spam and phishing attempts. The fewer people who can text from their government phones, the less vulnerable the White House is to a security breach. Of course, there are political considerations at play, too. “The issue usually on the political side of this is, ‘Well, wait a minute. If we let everyone do this, the leaks will go crazy,’” said Pescatore. “Quite often the worry is, ‘We want to make communication easier, but not that easy.’” Respectfully, we disagree. MESSAGE US — Are you Florida Republican Sen. RICK SCOTT? We want to hear from you. And we’ll keep you anonymous! Email us at westwingtips@politico.com. Did someone forward this email to you? Subscribe here!
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