Senior Biden communications aide Mariel Saez quits White House

Mariel Saez, the former aide to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer who has been serving as the Biden administration’s point person for booking top officials on television, is departing the White House for a role in the private sector.

Ms Saez, who served as a top communications adviser to Mr Hoyer for a decade before jumping to President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign and later his inaugural committee, started in her White House role on 20 January, the day Mr Biden took office. The news of her departure was first reported by CNN.

In a statement, she called the opportunity to serve Mr Biden “an honor” and said she was “grateful” to her “talented and dedicated colleagues at the White House and across the Administration” who “worked hand-in-hand with me to communicate the President's priorities across broadcast media”.

White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield called Ms Saez “an invaluable member of our team” and “a tremendous talent and an incomparable teammate” in a statement to CNN, and said Mr Biden’s administration has been well-served by “her strategic advice and counsel, close relationships with the networks, hard work, and dedication”.

“We will miss her dearly,” she added.

Because of the high pressure and long hours associated with jobs in the West Wing, it is considered part of the normal course of business for White House aides to decamp for other roles within an administration or the private sector after the one-year mark of a president’s term in office.

But Mr Biden’s roster of top aides and advisers has remained remarkably static during his first year in the White House, with his sole cabinet-level departure thus far taking place last week when Office of Science and Technology Policy director Eric Lander resigned after reports emerged of bullying behaviour towards subordinates. At the staff level, the highest-profile departure occurred early on in Mr Biden’s term when former White House Deputy Press Secretary TJ Ducklo resigned after it became known that he’d hurled abuse at a female Politico reporter who was enquiring about his relationship with a correspondent for Axios, Alexi McCammond.

The stability of the president’s team has been a stark contrast with that of Vice President Kamala Harris, whose office has seen departures of a plethora of high-level aides, most recently Symone Sanders, Ms Harris’s ex-chief spokesperson who recently signed on as a host and contributor with MSNBC.

Writing about Mr Biden’s lack of turnover in a Brookings Institution report, non-resident senior fellow Kathryn Tenpas called the number of top departures in the Biden administration “one of the lowest” out of the past six presidencies and said the stability of Mr Biden’s staff “may reflect the influence of experience and a professional transition operation”.