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Politics

White House comms director Kate Bedingfield to step down this summer: report

By
Mark Moore and
Samuel Chamberlain
Published July 6, 2022
Updated July 6, 2022, 6:36 p.m. ET

Kate Bedingfield, a longtime aide to President Biden, will step down as White House communications director later this month, as a new report this week suggests the administration is lost in a sea of dysfunction.

In a statement, the White House said Bedingfield, 40, was leaving to “spend more time with her husband and young children.” Her departure was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Bedingfield, who has been with Biden since he was Barack Obama’s vice president, was a key strategist on the president’s 2020 campaign — leading White House chief of staff Ron Klain to suggest in a statement that without her “talent and tenacity, Donald Trump might still be in the White House.”

“She played a huge role in everything the President has achieved—from his second term as Vice President, through the campaign and since coming to the White House,” Klain said, hailing Bedingfield’s work on pushing a $1.9 trillion COVID relief package through Congress as well as the confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court.

Those accomplishments have proven to be a double-edged sword for the administration: The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan has been blamed in large part for inflation reaching levels not seen since 1981, while Jackson’s confirmation as the first black woman on the high court was overshadowed by its decision overturning Roe v. Wade last month.

CNN reported Tuesday that the White House was caught flat-footed by the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — to the extent that the press aide in charge of crafting a response was getting coffee when the opinion by Justice Samuel Alito was handed down.  

White House Director of Communications Kate Bedingfield
White House communications director Kate Bedingfield has been with Biden since he was Barack Obama’s vice president. AFP via Getty Images

When Biden himself responded to the ruling, Democratic leaders reportedly mocked his statement — which had to be kept deliberately vague because the president and his aides had not agreed on more precise language despite having several weeks’ notice about the potential ruling following the leak of a draft Alito opinion in early May.

The seemingly weak response to the ruling has left liberal activists frustrated months ahead of a midterm election in which Democrats are expected to take heavy losses in the House and Senate. 

Bedingfield’s departure comes on the heels of Biden’s first White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, leaving the administration for a job with MSNBC. Psaki’s replacement, Karine Jean-Pierre, has experienced a rough first few weeks on the job — with Politico recently reporting that her answers to questions have “baffled reporters, and even made some of her White House colleagues wince.”

“She is so focused on not making a mistake that she doesn’t let herself speak freely,” one reporter told the outlet. “A lot of her responses end up becoming … it appears that she’s reading from a page.”

While the White House has yet to appoint Jean-Pierre’s replacement as principal deputy press secretary, three top staffers in the office departed last month for gigs at the State, Treasury and Energy Departments. 

Meanwhile, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby was shifted to the White House to fill a senior communications job shortly after Jean-Pierre became press secretary in mid-May, a move that some said implied a lack of confidence in the first black woman and first openly LGBT person to hold the position.