On the day after President Joe Biden decided to end his reelection bid in July, more than 300 former staffers for Vice President Kamala Harris publicly endorsed her candidacy — a flurry of alumni support with little precedent in this already unusual campaign.
“We were able to witness her leadership firsthand,” the former staffers wrote in a letter, attesting to Harris’s behavior on and off camera. “She is an extraordinary leader of great character.”
The rapidly assembled letter was a spontaneous outpouring of affection for Harris, said Rachel Palermo, who worked for Harris for three years in the vice president’s office and coordinated the effort.
But in interviews, former staff who signed the letter acknowledged it also addressed one of Harris’s perceived weaknesses as a candidate and elected official: her demanding management style. People who have worked for Harris say her interactions with staff can resemble a prosecutor prying details from a witness, asking pointed questions about everything from her schedule to policy briefings. And her cautious approach to big decisions has frustrated deputies rather than inspire them.
Harris’s record as a boss has been the focus of news stories throughout her career and amplified by high-profile staff departures.
As a senator, her office developed a reputation for a revolving door; according to a Legistorm analysis, the turnover in Harris’s office ranked her ninth among senators who served between 2017 and 2021. Turnover was especially high in 2019, as some left to join her campaign for the 2020 presidential nomination.
More than 90 percent of Harris’s vice-presidential staff who started working for her in early 2021 have since left the office, according to a Washington Post analysis of 101 positions in her office that have been funded by the Senate, which represents the bulk of her staff. She has been repeatedly dogged by reports of infighting and dysfunction among her aides.
The situation for Harris grew so worrisome in the summer of 2021 that Biden summoned his senior staff and issued a warning: If they were leaking negative stories about Harris, he would fire them, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting. Biden, who as president was surrounded by a cadre of close advisers who had stayed with him for decades, also privately called Harris to reassure her that she retained his support, they said.
The staff churn has spawned accusations of mismanagement by the vice president, but many Harris allies say that critique is overblown, sometimes rooted in her gender and race. By the same measure, for instance, her predecessor Mike Pence saw 83 percent turnover in his vice-presidential office. And former president Donald Trump’s White House staff was infamous for its turnover; one of his communications directors, Anthony Scaramucci, lasted just 11 days before his firing.
While some former staffers have publicly griped about Harris’s leadership, their complaints pale compared with warnings issued about Trump, whose former chief of staff, defense secretary, national security adviser and other key deputies have sounded alarm bells about his third attempt at the White House.
But interviews with 33 current and former staffers and allies show that Harris herself — and the team around her — have undergone important changes since the most difficult days of her first year as vice president. These people close to Harris, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of assessing the Democratic nominee’s leadership, say she grew into the role, found policy issues that more closely aligned with her comfort areas and replaced key aides with staffers who responded better to her management style.
Now her approach faces its biggest test yet, a supercharged national political campaign to win the White House in 60 days. Harris suddenly took over a vast and growing operation whose leadership includes operatives installed long ago by Biden as well as her own recruits, a balancing act of egos and ambitions. If elected, Harris will inherit a far larger management challenge: the vast federal bureaucracy.
People close to Harris say her widely praised presidential rollout, in which she quickly locked down the Democratic nomination following Biden’s withdrawal and moved to capitalize on her party’s enthusiasm and energy, are testaments to her management. They also point to the growing pool of alumni who have rejoined her team, particularly this summer. At least 20 staffers who previously worked for Harris are now working on her campaign, such as policy experts Rohini Kosoglu and Ike Irby, veterans of both her Senate and vice president’s office.
Those allies and staffers say that Harris’s management style hasn’t changed — but the circumstances have. Rather than trying to find her voice as a first-time presidential candidate or brand-new vice president, she has suddenly become the party’s standard-bearer. Office disputes during the height of the pandemic are now viewed as minor frustrations as Harris fights to keep Trump out of the White House.
“Her leadership roles, the way she thinks through problems and wants to tackle them — those have been a very consistent through line,” Irby said in a recent interview. “The mechanics around her — and the opportunities that those offices provide for leadership — those have changed.’
From California to D.C.
Reports that Harris was a difficult boss have followed her since her time in California politics, a career that began when she bested San Francisco District Attorney Terence Hallinan — her own former boss — in a runoff election in 2003. She was later elected California attorney general in 2010, a victory that elevated her national profile and installed her in a job overseeing more than 5,000 lawyers, investigators and other employees.
Some of those staff bristled at her leadership. Gil Duran, who served as Harris’s spokesperson for a five-month stint in 2013, has been perhaps her most persistent public critic — urging Harris in a 2021 column to “get a grip on the management issues and stop the cycle of dysfunction” that he said had marked her career.
In an op-ed published in 2019, Terry McAteer, a former school superintendent in California, alleged that his son Gregory witnessed Harris berating staff during Gregory’s brief internship in the attorney general’s office. The claims were secondhand and mostly overlooked at the time but received significant attention from conservative media in recent weeks as Harris emerged as Democrats’ nominee. McAteer alleged that Harris insisted that her staff stand every morning to greet her and say “good morning, general” and did not allow her junior staff to look her in the eye. Gregory McAteer declined to comment on the op-ed but said in an interview that he was supporting Harris for president; Terry McAteer declined to comment.
Other former staff and allies said that as attorney general, Harris could be tough, but never inappropriate or arrogant.
“She holds herself to an incredibly high standard, and therefore, she holds her team to a really high standard,” expecting their work to be thorough and complete, said Daniel Suvor, a former aide in California’s attorney general’s office between 2014 and 2017. Suvor, a lawyer whom Harris recruited from the Obama White House, said he believed McAteer’s claims to be “completely false,” offering examples of Harris’s approachability and saying she was down-to-earth. “She detested being called ‘general’ by her staff,” Suvor said.
Debbie Mesloh, who advised Harris during her 2010 attorney general campaign and subsequent transition in 2011, said Harris’s management style draws elements from Harris’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, a scientist and single parent who pushed her two daughters to fend for themselves intellectually.
“She talks a lot about their kitchen-table debates … you had to be informed to be able to present your case, and then to know enough to be able to defend your case,” Mesloh said. “Working with her was no different than that …. some people really struggled with that. But I found that rigor helped us aim higher.”
After longtime California Sen. Barbara Boxer (D) announced her retirement, Harris was elected to her seat in 2016 — the same day Donald Trump was elected president.
In interviews, Harris’s Senate staff said she was a firm but fair boss, crediting her for pushing them to hone messages and her planned committee questions so they would be simple and evocative.
Her January 2019 announcement that she would seek the White House inspired hope among her staff and supporters, but her bid fizzled out later that year, prompting a slew of tell-all stories and private recriminations, particularly about how she had managed and run the campaign organization.
Among the complaints: that Harris failed to provide direction and leadership to her campaign, confusing her own staffers, and that she couldn’t choose between her family members and political advisers, leaving rival factions to wrestle for control. Her sister Maya chaired the campaign.
Harris ended her campaign in December, weeks before the first primary in Iowa, a striking collapse for a candidate who was initially viewed as a top contender.
Juan Rodriguez, her 2019 campaign manager, declined to comment on specific criticisms of Harris’s management.
“I found Kamala Harris to be an excellent leader and an even more excellent human being,’ Rodriguez wrote in an email.
Becoming the ‘Veep’
Harris’s first year after taking office as vice president in 2021 was also challenging.
Harris was a historic figure from the moment she was inaugurated, the first woman, first Black person and first Indian American ever to reach the nation’s second-highest office. The role also positioned her as the front-runner to be the future leader of the Democratic Party.
But the history and expectations brought additional attention to an office that has been routinely overlooked in previous administrations and is about one-eighth the size of the president’s. Journalists shadowed her across the world; some tracked her popularity along with Biden’s, and political opponents sought to amplify any stumbles. Harris’s remarks also became fodder for comedic comparisons to HBO’s “Veep” — where actor Julia Louis-Dreyfuss played an oft-tongue-tied female vice president — a development that some staff found amusing and thrilling, and others found mortifying.
To serve as her primary gatekeeper and office manager, Harris appointed Tina Flournoy, a longtime Democratic operative as her first chief of staff. The two did not know each other previously, and Flournoy’s prior White House experience had been limited to serving as chief counsel in the personnel office during the Clinton administration.
Some current and former staff said that Flournoy’s visibility into White House operations was limited and that she had a difficult time managing requests for Harris’s time, frustrating the vice president’s longtime allies. Other staff defended Flournoy as a competent manager and said that the new chief of staff needed time to build the office and develop her relationship with Harris.
Flournoy did not respond to requests for comment.
At first, Harris sought to prove to Biden and his inner circle that she was a team player, following lingering tensions from the 2019 primary campaign, said six former and current White House staff with knowledge of those conversations.
The dynamic prompted Harris not to push immediately to carve out her own portfolio or hire her own people, often bringing in staffers who had previously worked for Biden.
It took time for her office to “gel,” said a former senior administration official who worked closely with Harris’s team.
Harris also told Biden and senior officials that she did not want to be defined by women’s or racial issues, particularly in her first year. As a result, her top priorities in 2021 included improving voting rights and reducing migration at the southern border. Harris struggled to make progress on both of those issues, which contributed to office frustrations, said current and former staffers.
Making matters more difficult, Harris took office in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic, meaning her staff initially worked remotely.
Ashley Etienne, who served as Harris’s communications director in 2021, said the pandemic reduced their White House work — already “the most taxing emotionally, financially, physically, job you can have” — into what felt like Zoom-filled drudgery for months.
“We couldn’t even meet with her. We couldn’t even be in the same room with her,” Etienne said.
Some of Harris’s early staff was also discomfited by her prosecutorial leadership style, former staffers said, which included pointed questions from Harris about footnotes in their reports or the reasons behind why certain items had been added to her schedule.
“It’s stressful to brief her, because she’s read all the materials, has annotated it and is prepared to talk through it,” said one former aide.
“You can’t come to the vice president and just ask her to do something,” said another staffer. “You need to have a why.”
That behavior manifests in other encounters, the staffer continued, such as when someone pays her compliments. “She’ll turn to them and say ‘why?,’ and that throws them off,” the staffer said.
By the summer of 2021, Biden felt compelled to step in, issuing his warning to staffers about leaking.
The scrutiny was accelerated by a wave of staff departures later that year, including Etienne and fellow Harris spokesperson Symone Sanders. The turnover was also compounded by natural churn: The vice president’s office has traditionally relied heavily on staff from other parts of government who serve short-term details.
In August 2021, Harris and Flournoy hired Lorraine Voles, who had been a spokesperson under then-President Bill Clinton and the communications director under then-Vice President Al Gore, to serve as a key communications aide. That experience gave Voles more “muscle memory” than Flournoy on how to navigate the White House, said the former senior administration official who worked closely with Harris’s office.
Staff say that Voles — who holds a master’s degree in organizational leadership — helped steady the office by better managing and deploying its several dozen workers. In April 2022, Harris replaced Flournoy as chief of staff with Voles.
Voles developed a strategic plan for how to maximize Harris’s time and carve out her own lane, particularly on reproductive health after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 and ended the national right to abortion. The role was a natural fit: Harris is a longtime champion of reproductive rights, while Biden — a practicing Catholic who often avoids saying the word “abortion” — sometimes struggles to explain his administration’s policies.
By 2023, staffers say Harris had become more comfortable making spot decisions to push her agenda. In April 2023, she decided within hours to travel to Nashville in support of the “Tennessee Three” — the state lawmakers who were kicked out of their posts for protesting gun control. This spring, she quickly visited Florida to criticize a state law that took effect that day and banned abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.
In private meetings with staff, she has drilled down on issues such as how federal patient privacy laws intersect with Republicans’ efforts to crack down on abortion access, said Jennifer Klein, the director of the White House Gender Policy Council, which has worked closely with Harris on reproductive health issues.
“I really didn’t know her at all, and all of a sudden I was in staff meetings, with four or five people … and she pushed me,” said Klein. “She demands a lot of the people who work for her and with her, but she really does that because she wants the best product.”
Turnover in Harris’s office has slowed as the vice president’s team stabilized. One-third of current staff have been on the team for more than two years, her office said; turnover in the VP’s office since the summer of 2021 is roughly on par with the rest of the White House.
People close to Harris said she has not changed how she manages staff but has surrounded herself with people more comfortable with her style, including a bevy of alumni. Kirsten Allen, a 2019 campaign spokesperson, is now her communications director; Kristine Lucius, her former Senate chief of staff and White House legislative policy adviser, is on her third tour of duty as Harris’s domestic policy adviser; Josh Hsu, who worked for her in the Senate, on the 2019 presidential campaign and in the White House, has returned for a fourth tour on the current campaign.
“She has developed a group of people around her that she trusts, that trust each other, and have the ability to work together as a coherent team. And that’s really critical,” said the former senior administration official.
The Harris that her allies see
Current and former staff say they remain frustrated by the repeated depiction of Harris as an angry boss, insisting that it doesn’t match a manager who can be goofy and affectionate when she’s not focused on serious policy issues.
“What’s lost in the reporting … all the things that she does with the team, and the way that she’s fun,” said Mesloh, who worked with Harris in California. Mesloh described how Harris encouraged staff to bring their children to the office, hosted team dinners, and even made lists with staff about the best food trucks in cities like Los Angeles.
Officials and allies also pointed to the role of sexism and racism in shaping perception of Harris. More than a dozen current and former staff said that her management style was little different from prior bosses who were White men.
“The VP has been policed in ways that other politicians I worked for weren’t policed,” said one former Harris staffer, who’s worked for other top Democrats. “People from outside our office came to me, wanting to change how she laughed. I can’t remember anyone ever trying to change how Mike Pence or Joe Biden laughed.”
Some of Harris’s staffers-turned-critics are quietly rethinking their views, declining questions about their prior complaints.
Duran — the former aide in Harris’s California attorney general’s office who was once dubbed “the go-to anti-Harris quote” by Politico — said he’s swallowing his criticism too.
“There’s no question in my mind that whatever Harris’s flaws are, Donald Trump is much, much worse,” Duran said.
Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.
