‘People are pissed’: Tensions rise amid scramble for Biden jobs

In late 2008, during the transition from George W. Bush to Barack Obama, there was a mantra that took hold among Washington insiders: Obama won the election but Hillary won the transition.

The most loyal denizens of the Obama campaign — the people who were with him from Springfield to Grant Park — watched with deep trepidation as the Obama administration was staffed at the highest levels with the same Clintonites — including Hillary herself — they thought they had vanquished in the Democratic primaries the previous summer.

It is still early in the Biden transition. There are thousands of jobs to fill. But a similar sense of dread is starting to bubble up from veterans of the Biden campaign, particularly those who were there with the president-elect from the Philadelphia announcement speech to the Wilmington victory speech. The target of their ire? The Obama establishment, which has eclipsed the Clinton name as shorthand for yesterday’s Democratic Party.

“The Obama staffers are now cutting out the people who got Biden elected,” said a senior Biden official channeling the feelings of the old guard of the Biden campaign, who requested anonymity for the obvious reason. “None of these people found the courage to help the VP when he was running and now they are elevating their friends over the Biden people. It’s f----- up.”

Another Biden adviser who worked on the campaign echoed the point. “It is a very valid criticism,” the adviser said. “A lot of people are living in uncertainty.”

There are some caveats, both about the 2008 transition battle between the campaign and the transition and the 2020 sequel. Back then Obama was a member of the U.S. Senate, where he didn’t have a large staff on which to rely upon for government positions. He was also taking over the presidency in the middle of a raging economic crisis. It shouldn’t have been surprising that he would draw from a pool of talent that dominated the administration of the last Democratic president.

Today, the conventional wisdom is that Biden is actually stocking his administration with his campaign loyalists at the expense of other factions within his party. And in one sense that’s true. The top of the campaign — Ron Klain, Mike Donilon and Steve Ricchetti — will move into the top slots of the Biden White House. Biden’s two top national security advisers on the campaign will take over the two top national security jobs in the administration: Tony Blinken as secretary of State and Jake Sullivan as national security adviser. The campaign manager, Jen O'Malley Dillon, and one of the campaign co-chairs, Rep. Cedric Richmond, will have senior White House roles.

The relatively uncontroversial nature of these picks has been by design. Internally, Biden officials have been instructed to emphasize to reporters how normal the picks are, how “these are tested leaders.” It’s seen as a success if the Biden staff and Cabinet announcements don’t make much news.

But just below that elite level there is concern bordering on panic — depending on who you talk to — about the perceived lack of outreach to many campaign alumni. “There’s real doubt about whether they will be taken care of,” said the Biden adviser.

Some of the grumbling dates back to one of the main divides in the Biden campaign: people who joined the campaign before Dillon was named campaign manager in March and those who came in after. Some in the old guard feel they were underappreciated — they won the Democratic nomination! — and were layered over by Dillon hires who are now being prioritized for White House jobs.

Several people I talked to pointed out that both Dillon and Julie Rodriguez, one of her campaign deputies, received high-profile positions in the White House before people like Kate Bedingfield and Symone Sanders, two prominent veterans from the pre-Dillon era who are still widely seen as likely to receive top communications jobs. “People who were not part of winning the hard-fought primary were placed before people who were part of that,” said the Biden adviser. "If you noticed, Jen’s people are being taken care of.”

In response to these criticisms, a Biden transition official, who asked to remain anonymous because they were concerned that the Biden campaign officials speaking out might “focus their frustrations towards me,” said in a prepared statement: “The Biden-Harris transition team includes many longtime campaign staff working alongside transition staff who have been laying the groundwork for a smooth transition for months. It is still extremely early in the process of staffing the Biden-Harris Administration and the people who put in the hard work to win will continue to be an integral part of the work moving forward."

Some of the factionalism forming is related to Biden’s long career. Not everyone involved with helping him get to the White House formally worked on the campaign. There are Biden Senate staffers, Biden vice presidential staffers, Biden presidential primary staffers, and Biden general election staffers. Some people straddle multiple eras. The current fears about the transition being taken over by the previous generation of Obama staffers who make up Washington’s permanent establishment are coming from a younger set of Biden true believers who chose to work for him in early 2019 even when all of the cool young operatives were flocking to Beto and Bernie and Warren.

Even then, there was a disconnect between the brain trust at the top of the campaign, which is now seamlessly moving to the top of the White House, and the Biden proletariat that made up the bulk of the campaign operation. The fear from the proles is that the brain trust doesn’t understand that they are being left behind. So they are speaking out — anonymously — in the hope that people like Klain and Ricchetti and Donilon, and perhaps the president-elect himself, will take notice.

In the meantime, many of these people are sitting around and waiting, often without any real understanding of how they even apply for crucial jobs.

“People are pissed,” said the Biden adviser. “I think I’m going to be taken care of but I have not been taken care of yet. I am really interested to find out how you even find out how you got a job in this White House.”