Rice has relied on internal maneuvering and bureaucratic know-how to place herself at the center of some of the fiercest debates roiling Washington.
For more than a year, Democratic lawmakers and like-minded advocates have pleaded with Joe Biden to create a “gun czar” to address the epidemic of violence.
on guns, she joined him on several occasions in his residence. Senior aides say Biden’s trust in her is so profound that she can see him whenever she needs to. Rice’s elevated stature in the West Wing has come with fierce loyalty from colleagues and praise so superlative-laden that it borders on deification. More recently, it has led to speculation inside the White House that she will succeed Ron Klain should he leave the chief of staff post. Rice has privately told people in recent days that she has no interest in the job, describing herself as a policy person at heart.
Regardless of one’s views on her, Rice’s rise resembles one of the great Lazarushian tales in modern politics. She was too hot to touch even for some in her own party by the end of the Obama years, having become the chief protagonist in Republicans’ investigations into the attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.
“If I feel a need to come back, and there’s a role I think I can contribute to and I’m excited about doing it, I leave open that possibility, too,” she added. “I honestly haven’t answered for myself the question of … is this the last thing I want to do in government or not? And I don’t feel any sense of urgency to answer that.”She grew up in the nation’s capital and was the valedictorian at her private girls’ school there before attending Stanford University and becoming a Rhodes Scholar.
“The most important element of this job is the ability to move the process within the government and that is the hardest part. That is the part that requires the most experience and expertise,” said Cecilia Muñoz, who headed the DPC under Obama, helped lead the Biden transition and spoke with Rice when she considered the position. “This is somebody who was going to have zero learning curve with respect to how to make the process work.
In one tone-setting episode at the beginning of the administration, Rice grew frustrated with Senate Democrats over a perceived delay in getting Miguel Cardona confirmed as Education secretary, going as far as to air her complaints directly to Sen. Patty Murray , who chaired the committee in charge of his nomination, a person with knowledge of the back-and-forth said.
Sen. Michael Bennet , another lawmaker close with Rice, countered the notion that she’s on the outs with senators. In their first conversation after she took the DPC job, he talked about including the child-tax credit expansion in Biden’s Covid-relief bill at a time when it was uncertain if it would be in there. “I think I sent her the longest text message I ever sent anybody on a Sunday night and I woke up the next morning and it was in the plan,” said Bennet.
So far, the White House isn’t budging. Officials note that Biden has signed four packages on gun-violence reduction through executive order, outpacing the previous administrations at this point in their histories. They maintain that if not for Rice making issues like community violence intervention a priority, far less would have been done already. And they say she’s looking closely at how they could do more.
“She’s not the friendliest person you’ve ever come across,” a former senior administration official who worked with Rice said, “but I think she’s also respectful.”One is her notoriously sharp tongue and proclivity for profanity that intimidates some and endears her to others. “She’s like, ‘Why is this person proposing policy? We are the policy makers and that person is already at the table,’” said another White House official.
“Sometimes we joke about how she’s the only one [internally] fighting for advocating for debt relief when she’s painted as against it,” a White House official said. Rice also butted heads with Department of Health and Human Services personnel early on. She felt HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra lacked relevant experience on the issues and was hesitant to get in there and try — and some DPC staff saw Becerra as worried about his own political exposure to the issues at the border, according to a former official who worked closely with Rice.
An additional point of contention was over the number of unaccompanied children that could be transferred into HHS shelters. With limited shelters available, Rice pushed HHS to exceed its traditional capacity limits to get more migrant children out of the sparse border facilities at the center of the immigration crisis.
He called her eager to dive into the work, noting she immersed herself in the operational challenges of setting up new HHS shelters and the need to speed up reunifying migrant children with their qualified U.S. sponsors. A White House official pushed back on that sentiment in a statement, saying the president’s “robust affirmative immigration agenda — from expanding legal migration channels to speeding up the asylum process and providing more opportunities for temporary workers — speaks for itself.” Rice, the official said, has been “a great champion of all of it.
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