Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With help from producer Raymond Rapada. Send tips | Subscribe here | Email Eli | Email Lauren The White House travel office is understaffed. And it’s causing problems. White House reporters have long expressed frustration over the office’s dysfunction, grumbling about last-minute trip plans, unclear communication and poor logistics. But the disorganization has also caused issues for private companies that do business with the White House. The travel office is responsible for organizing everything — from hotels to air fare and ground transportation — for reporters who cover the president on foreign and domestic trips. Newsrooms ultimately cover these expenses, but because of the security concerns related to being in close proximity to the president, the travel office handles all the bookings and trip coordination. The travel office is also responsible for keeping track of billing for the trips, passing along detailed accounts to a third-party company that then collects money from news outlets to pay vendors. But the White House travel office is so behind on billing that some vendors have not been paid in a timely fashion. That created problems for Travel Command, the private company that had handled the press corps billing since the GEORGE W. BUSH administration and completely stopped working with the White House about 18 months ago. “When Biden came over, they were extremely casual about doing their jobs,” said KLARA PUSTKOWSKI, who worked at Travel Command for 17 years. “After a month or two, I realized that they just aren’t serious about this. I became frustrated and it’s one of the reasons I retired.” “In past administrations, they understood money. They understood that they needed to provide stuff to us on time in order to function,” she added. “I didn’t understand the attitude that the Biden administration had.” Part of the issue is that the White House’s travel office has only two full-time employees. Although advance staffers and other officials help out, it’s still far below the normal five to seven full-time travel office staffers employed by previous administrations. “We always stayed busy,” said a former White House official who worked in a previous administration’s travel office, adding that even with their staff of five, it could be a lot of work. “We had weeks when we’d be putting in 40 hours and others that would be 80 hours.” The White House Correspondents’ Association has brought up concerns about the travel office with administration officials since the start of JOE BIDEN’s presidency, but few changes have been made. The issue recently came to a head when newsrooms were informed that Air Partner, which took over billing from Travel Command, said it would be hiring additional staff to work through the White House’s billing backlog — and offset the cost by charging newsrooms more per trip. “At a time when newsrooms are being forced to cut costs, this is yet another unfortunate consequence of the White House’s unwillingness to address issues with the travel office,” said a White House reporter. A White House official said a new travel office director had recently been hired and that the office would soon have three full-time employees. “WHCA and White House have been in communication and working on this issue. We look forward to working with WHCA to create a smoother experience for reporters covering the president,” the official said. A person familiar with the situation suggested that part of the recent problems could stem from Air Partner working through its own personnel turnover as well as changes to its billing system and the press corps travel website. Air Partner did not respond to West Wing Playbook’s request for comment prior to publication. Aside from the billing issues, White House reporters have other frustrations with the travel office. The White House left newsrooms to cover the cost of a charter flight to Australia last year after that leg of the president’s trip was canceled. It also refused to pick up the bill for a Wilmington hotel after the travel office forgot to cancel the reservation when the president’s weekend trip was pulled. One time, the travel office was so behind on planning a weekend trip to Rehoboth that when it finally got around to booking hotels, the closest option it offered pool reporters was nearly an hour away in Ocean City, Md. The dysfunction within the travel office might appear, on the surface, to be inconsequential and not as ethically problematic as issues that have arisen in previous administrations. But veteran White House reporters are quick to point out that a well functioning travel office has long been an essential element of White House coverage, and it’s a critical component to making sure that reporters are with the president everywhere he goes. As the White House reporter argued, the office has been fine tuned into a well-oiled machine over multiple administrations. There’s no reason, they said, for it to be this dysfunctional under the Biden administration. “We aren’t asking them to reinvent the wheel,” they said. MESSAGE US — Are you A WHITE HOUSE VENDOR WAITING TO GET PAID? We want to hear from you. And we’ll keep you anonymous! Email us at westwingtips@politico.com. Did someone forward this email to you? Subscribe here!
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