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 year, in the lead up to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, as an A-list guest or two drops out, extra tickets open up for newsrooms to extend to White House officials, congressional aides and party staffers who didn’t make the first round of invites. That’s not happening this year. Staffers on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue have been frantically calling and texting reporters and newsroom executives hoping to snag a last-minute seat to the April 29 gala, but there just aren’t any extra tickets to give. “It’s out of control this year,” said a person in charge of dinner invites for a major TV network. The angst is especially palpable in the White House communications shop, with some uninvited staffers annoyed that more junior staffers managed to score a ticket over them. “There are people who’ve been going to the dinner year after year who, you know, the music stopped playing and they didn’t have a chair. And it feels like there just are not a bunch of tickets and tables coming up available,” said White House Correspondents’ Association president TAMARA KEITH, who, along with other board members, is responsible for planning the dinner. The WHCA only sells dinner tickets to its members, who are then free to invite a who’s who of Beltway officials. Demand is always high. But with fewer Covid concerns than last year — when attendees were required to provide proof of a same-day negative Covid test and some potential guests stayed away after the Gridiron Club dinner just weeks earlier turned out to be a superspreader — everyone now wants in. “This year is truly the year that we came back from Covid,” said Keith. Newsrooms are also trying to make a big splash this year, especially after some outlets canceled events around last year’s dinner due to Covid concerns. CBS News, which went all out in 2022 when its own STEVEN PORTNOY was WHCA president, is hosting a ritzy after-party at the French ambassador’s residence for the second year in a row. (Invites have yet to go out for this one, so keep an eye on those inboxes!) NBC News Group has already sent out invites for its annual after-party, which is being held at the Organization of American States. CNN is also back with its Political Hangover brunch next Sunday at The Line hotel. And that’s just to name a few of the dozens of events going on around town. Over the course of its 100-year history, the dinner has snowballed into a weeklong schmoozefest. But it’s dedicated to an important cause — the First Amendment — and an enormous amount of work goes into it. Think of planning a wedding… but for 2,600 guests. Seriously. In the days leading up to the dinner, not only has Keith been busy writing her speech, but she also has been selecting table linens and attending food tastings. And don’t even ask her about the seating chart. “We were really dramatically oversold,” said Keith. “There’s just literally only so many tables in the room.” Landing a table at the front of the room — near where President JOE BIDEN, Keith and other WHCA board members will sit — has become a symbol of importance among the D.C. media world. In the past few days, Keith has responded to a flood of emails from people unhappy about their table location. “Many people are going to be sitting at tables that they don’t think correctly acknowledge their importance and stature. And that’s really tough,” Keith said. “It’s impossible for me to convince anyone that your table placement is not a value judgment.” The other big clout marker for news outlets is which senior administration officials they get as guests. News outlets can get competitive with each other and the highest ranking officials tend to pick who they want to attend the dinner with. West Wing Playbook pulled together a list of who some White House officials will be sitting with next Saturday at the Washington Hilton: POLITICO Director of the Office of Management and Budget SHALANDA YOUNG Senior adviser GENE SPERLING Senior adviser MITCH LANDRIEU Deputy Attorney General LISA MONACO CBS Homeland Security Secretary ALEJANDRO MAYORKAS FBI Director CHRIS WRAY NBC Commerce Secretary GINA RAIMONDO Ambassador to the U.N. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD Communications director BEN LABOLT SBA Administrator ISABELLA CASILLAS GUZMAN Deputy press secretary EMILIE SIMONS WALL STREET JOURNAL Senior adviser MIKE DONILON Senior adviser and staff secretary NEERA TANDEN Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. MARK MILLEY Adviser to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Col. DAVE BUTLER ABC Secretary of State ANTONY BLINKEN Secretary of Education MIGUEL CARDONA Deputy communications director HERBIE ZISKEND USA TODAY Director of the Office of Public Engagement STEVE BENJAMIN National Security Council spokesperson JOHN KIRBY National Security Council director for the Western Hemisphere JUAN GONZALEZ NPR Covid response coordinator ASHISH JHA Under secretary of Defense for policy COLIN KAHL WASHINGTON POST Domestic Policy Council director SUSAN RICE Homeland security adviser LIZ SHERWOOD-RANDALL LOS ANGELES TIMES Deputy communications director KATE BERNER Press secretary to the vice president KIRSTEN ALLEN REAL CLEAR POLITICS Deputy press secretary ANDREW BATES Treasury Department senior spokesperson MEGAN APPER BLOOMBERG State Department Chief of Protocol RUFUS GIFFORD NEWSNATION Assistant press secretary KELLY SCULLY MESSAGE US — Are you TAMMY HADDAD? INVITE US TO BRUNCH!? Email us at westwingtips@politico.com. Did someone forward this email to you? 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