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. JOE BIDEN’s White House is awfully crowded. There are 560 people working in the Executive Office of the President (EOP) with salaries totaling nearly $50 million, according to disclosures released Thursday afternoon. That’s more people than BARACK OBAMA or DONALD TRUMP’s White Houses, according to a review of their annual disclosures. Neither of those previous two White Houses ever cracked 500 people on the payroll. (The Biden White House payroll is about the same as the Obama White House’s payroll in its first year, adjusted for inflation, though.) “The total number of employees and total salaries in this year’s report are indeed higher than in past recent reports,” a White House official acknowledged. “The White House increased the number of staff in [for fiscal year 2021] to support staffing the government through a transition and to meet the incredible needs that were apparent at the beginning of the Administration, most notably, the global pandemic.” The staff levels are about more than just responding to the national crises, however. The large White House is indicative of how Biden has centralized a lot of policy making inside his West Wing rather than rely on his Cabinet, many of whom he has deployed as prominent surrogates. JEFFREY ZIENTS and his 21-person team, for example, take the lead on Covid-19 more than Health and Human Services Secretary XAVIER BECERRA and the massive HHS bureaucracy. GINA McCARTHY and her climate office are closer to Biden than the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, MICHAEL REGAN. The National Economic Council, the Council of Economic Advisers and the Domestic Policy Council are shaping the president’s economic policy agenda more than Treasury Secretary JANET YELLEN. Biden’s staff number is a bit inflated, as 36 people on the disclosure list are unpaid members of his Supreme Court Commission considering possible reforms of the high court. But even subtracting those staffers, his White House remains bigger than his immediate predecessors. In some ways, Biden is just continuing the trend. The EOP started with just six advisers in 1939 but has gradually grown in size over the decades. RICHARD NIXON in particular was wary of career bureaucrats and bulked up the White House operation. Biden’s fattening of his operations, however, also reflects a desire to make sure that allies — and he has many — are well rewarded and remain inside the tent. He has 21 Assistants to the President, or APs, the top rank in the arcane White House hierarchy. They include longtime confidantes like RON KLAIN, BRUCE REED and STEVE RICCHETTI. He also has brought close advisers on board at other levels. Take NEERA TANDEN . After her nomination to head the Office of Management and Budget floundered, the president found a place for her as a senior adviser, even though he already had several people playing that role. The latest disclosures show Tanden earning a salary of $180,000. That’s a nice chunk of taxpayer change, but also a significant pay cut from what she was making as president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, where her 2019 salary was about $368,000 along with about $51,000 or so in “other compensation,” according to CAP's tax filing The White House also released a fact sheet. Here are the stats they touted: *Of senior staff, 56 percent are female. *Of White House employees appointed during the Biden administration, women make up 60 percent of staff. *Women earn $93,752 on average; men earn $94,639 on average. *About 44 percent of Biden appointees are racially and/or ethnically diverse. PROGRAMMING NOTE: West Wing Playbook will not publish on Monday, July 5. We'll be back on our normal schedule on Tuesday, July 6. Do you work in the Biden administration? Are you in touch with the White House? Are you MIKE GWIN? 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. | 
