EXCLUSIVE — The majority of Joe Biden‘s White House officials are women or racial minorities, even after a significant number of staff departed following the president’s first year in office, an analysis of White House personnel confirmed.
The White House publishes its full Executive Office of the President payroll every July, and 2022’s report shows that 44% of staffers are racial or ethnic minorities, and 58% are women. Those numbers are in line with 2021’s demographic breakdown, and both categories appear higher within the White House than their 40.2% and 50.5% representation in the U.S. population.
BIDEN STAFFERS LEFT WHITE HOUSE IN YEAR ONE AT HIGHER RATE THAN TRUMP AND OBAMA
Of Biden’s senior White House staff, roughly 56% are female, and 38% are racially or ethnically diverse.
“From the outset, the President made a commitment to building an Administration that looks like America,” White House deputy press secretary Chris Meagher told the Washington Examiner. “The Biden-Harris Administration is — and remains — the most diverse Administration in history.”
This comes after a string of headlines suggesting tensions at the White House had caused an exodus of black staffers, including the departures of former Director of the Office of Public Engagement Cedric Richmond for the Democratic National Committee and Vice President Kamala Harris’s former communications director, Symone Sanders, for NBC News.
Politico published a report in late May that 20 black staffers were planning their departure, or had already left the White House, in a worsening trend dubbed the “Blaxit” by some staffers.
“I have heard about an exodus of Black staffers from the White House — ‘Blaxit’ — and I am concerned,” Spencer Overton, president of the government diversity tracker the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, said at the time. “Black voters accounted for 22 percent of President Biden’s voters in November 2020. It is essential that Black staffers are not only recruited to serve in senior, mid-level and junior White House positions, but are also included in major policy and personnel decisions and have opportunities for advancement.”
The White House has aggressively pushed back on “Blaxit” reporting. Roughly 14% of Biden’s staff in year one was black, and officials say that 15% of that number were on track to be promoted in 2022 or had been promoted already.
One senior Democratic official suggested to the Washington Examiner that the perceived high level of black staffer departures was simply explained by typical workforce churn.
“When you have a much higher total number of black staffers in the first place, it’s natural that there would be a greater-than-normal number leaving,” the person stated. “The White House is an extremely grueling place to work, and staffers across administrations often take that stepping stone to new opportunities.”
The White House additionally pointed to a number of actions taken through Biden’s first 18 months in office with the specific goal of increasing White House diversity and equity, including:
- Onboarded the most diverse White House staff in history, including the first-ever chief diversity and inclusion director and first-ever full-time ASL staff interpreters
- Developed structured pay bands at each level, a best practice to support pay equity across teams
- Provided trainings for all White House hiring managers on best practices in equitable hiring and methods for reducing implicit bias in interviewing
- Instituted a policy that asks White House hiring managers to interview no fewer than four candidates for each open role, with at least 50% of them identifying as diverse
- Rolled out learning and development programs and opportunities that improve the overall staff experience
- Secured the necessary statutory authority and funding for the first-ever paid White House internship program and continue to engage closely with diverse stakeholders to ensure recruitment for all cohorts of Biden-Harris White House interns speaks directly to historically underrepresented communities of color
However, the Biden White House workforce did shrink at a much faster rate than his immediate predecessors. The White House saw 15% of staff leave between Biden’s first and second years in office, compared to 4% and 1%, respectively, for former Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
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Biden’s staff turnover rate, 29%, virtually matched the Obama year one turnover rate, 28%, and a White House official told the Washington Examiner that the overall staff reduction could largely be attributed to offboarding nonpermanent staff, especially 36 members of Biden’s Supreme Court Commission, who were listed on the 2021 EOP personnel report.
