Kamala Harris: Boss from Hell
-
Under Kamala Harris, the Office of the Vice President has been called a “revolving door,” a “staff exodus” of key aides “heading for the exits.”
That’s not hyperbole from the national media.
Our auditors at OpenTheBooks quantified an extraordinarily high 91.5-percent staff turnover rate. We used U.S. Senate disclosures to conduct our investigation and those databases can be downloaded below.
Elected in November 2020, Harris took the oath of office in January 2021.
As of March 31, 2024, only four of the initial 47 staffers from the first year are still employed – consistently and without interruption – by the Vice President.
Furthermore, the turnover chaos isn’t getting better. In the trailing 12-month period, 24 staffers left — that’s almost half the employees.
Download the Office of Vice President 2021 & 2024 payrolls here (source: U.S. Senate disclosures)
The “top-to-bottom dysfunction” that The Atlantic referenced in October 2023 is shown in the reported payrolls that we captured.
“In her first year and a half as vice president, Harris saw the departure of her chief of staff, communications director, domestic-policy adviser, national security adviser, and other aides,” the magazine wrote.
If only that was all who left...
Harris isn’t alone in her inability to retain staff.
Since 2021, only 127 of Biden’s initial 560 White House employees remain, a 77-percent turnover rate that would be considered high if not for Harris’ 92-percent rate.
Between 2023 and 2024, 225 people left, a 43-percent turnover rate that is only slightly lower than the 46-percent between 2022 and 2023.
(For context, Donald Trump’s payroll turnover from his first year until his fourth year was 72-percent.)
But Biden’s high turnover isn’t the only staffing failure that should give taxpayers pause.
He has the largest White House headcount since the Richard Nixon administration, who was the first president to exceed 500 staffers.
Now Biden employs 565 staffers, costing taxpayers $61 million in salaries. That’s up from the 524 staffers in 2023, costing $52 million.
Biden has 152 more employees than Trump (413) (FY2020) and 97 more than Obama (468) (FY2012), when each were in the fourth year of their first terms.
-
I would be curious to know what staff turnover is normally like, but that sounds extraordinarily high for Biden and Trump as well. But hers is on an entirely different level.
Plus, Joe and Kamala aren’t reality TV stars based on a series where the premise was firing people…
-
There were stories coming out about Kamala the first couple of years indicating that she was not well liked.
-
