The new numbers come as Harris consolidates her position as Joe Biden’s successor atop the Democratic ticket.
Throughout her career as a senator and then vice president, Kamala Harris developed a reputation as a difficult boss who struggles to retain staff due to the atmosphere of suspicion and disorder that tends to develop among her subordinates.
Data from the government watchdog group Open the Books — released Monday, as Harris consolidates her position as President Biden’s successor atop the Democratic ticket — makes clear just how extreme Harris’s personnel problem really is: 91.5 percent of the staff Harris began her vice presidential term with three years ago have since left.
“Kamala Harris is taking center stage in the national discussion these days. However, our analysis of her payroll as vice president shows an extraordinary churn,” Open the Books CEO Adam Andrzejewski said. “The stories out there are more than just anecdotes, they’re substantiated by the hard data available to us. Only a rare and loyal few staffers have persisted through her term as vice president.”
While high turnover is typical for a vice presidential staff, the level of churn — and public backbiting — in Harris’s office stands out.
A theme of instability has pervaded the vice president’s office since Harris took office in January 2021. Months after she assumed the vice presidency, many staffers left Harris’s office in a mini-exodus due to burnout and in pursuit of better career opportunities, Axios reported at the time. In the summer of 2022, two of the vice president’s most senior staffers, her domestic policy adviser and director of speechwriting, left on good terms, generating questions as to whether or not Harris had a loyal network of aides willing to follow her, perhaps even to the Oval Office.
Only four of the initial 47 staffers Harris brought in with her in 2021 are still employed in her office, as of March 31, 2024, Open the Books found: Yael S. Belkind, assistant to the chief of staff, Nasrina Bargzie, former associate counsel and current deputy council, Oludayo O. Faderin, former associate director and current deputy director of west wing operations, and Olivia K. Hartman, former advance coordinator and current deputy director of scheduling.
From April 2023 to March 2024, 24 individuals left their jobs in Harris’s office.
Harris’s former staffers, from her time as San Francisco’s district attorney, California attorney general, and a U.S. senator, blew the whistle on Harris’s reportedly toxic workplace culture to Business Insider in 2021. An insider told Politico around the same time that the OVP under Harris “is not a healthy environment and people often feel mistreated.”
Biden has a staff turnover rate of 77 percent, Open the Books found, and only 127 of the 560 White House employees he initially hired still hold positions in the President’s orbit.
The vice president’s office has evaded Open the Books’ past attempts to obtain the names, titles, and salaries of Harris’s staff, the nonprofit said.
“Despite claiming to be the most transparent administration ever, their response is too often something like, ‘we don’t absolutely have to tell you, so we won’t,'” Andrzejewski said. “The Office of the Vice President is particularly opaque because they claim they’re not an ‘agency’ of the federal government. That makes Harris, well, the least transparent elected official in the country.”
“Taxpayers deserve to see how payroll is handled in her office, what personnel and policy areas are priorities for her, and assess her performance against the cost and headcount,” he added. “Instead, we have to rely on semi-annual disclosures to Congress to fill in some of the blanks.”