Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With help from Allie Bice.

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Every year, in the lead up to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, as an A-list guest or two drops out, extra tickets open up for newsrooms to extend to White House officials, congressional aides and party staffers who didn’t make the first round of invites.

That’s not happening this year.

Staffers on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue have been frantically calling and texting reporters and newsroom executives hoping to snag a last-minute seat to the April 29 gala, but there just aren’t any extra tickets to give.

“It’s out of control this year,” said a person in charge of dinner invites for a major TV network. The angst is especially palpable in the White House communications shop, with some uninvited staffers annoyed that more junior staffers managed to score a ticket over them.

“There are people who’ve been going to the dinner year after year who, you know, the music stopped playing and they didn’t have a chair. And it feels like there just are not a bunch of tickets and tables coming up available,” said White House Correspondents’ Association president TAMARA KEITH, who, along with other board members, is responsible for planning the dinner.

The WHCA only sells dinner tickets to its members, who are then free to invite a who’s who of Beltway officials. Demand is always high. But with fewer Covid concerns than last year — when attendees were required to provide proof of a same-day negative Covid test and some potential guests stayed away after the Gridiron Club dinner just weeks earlier turned out to be a superspreader — everyone now wants in.

“This year is truly the year that we came back from Covid,” said Keith.

Newsrooms are also trying to make a big splash this year, especially after some outlets canceled events around last year’s dinner due to Covid concerns. CBS News, which went all out in 2022 when its own STEVEN PORTNOY was WHCA president, is hosting a ritzy after-party at the French ambassador’s residence for the second year in a row. (Invites have yet to go out for this one, so keep an eye on those inboxes!)

NBC News Group has already sent out invites for its annual after-party, which is being held at the Organization of American States. CNN is also back with its Political Hangover brunch next Sunday at The Line hotel. And that’s just to name a few of the dozens of events going on around town.

Over the course of its 100-year history, the dinner has snowballed into a weeklong schmoozefest. But it’s dedicated to an important cause — the First Amendment — and an enormous amount of work goes into it. Think of planning a wedding… but for 2,600 guests. Seriously. In the days leading up to the dinner, not only has Keith been busy writing her speech, but she also has been selecting table linens and attending food tastings. And don’t even ask her about the seating chart.

“We were really dramatically oversold,” said Keith. “There’s just literally only so many tables in the room.”

Landing a table at the front of the room — near where President JOE BIDEN, Keith and other WHCA board members will sit — has become a symbol of importance among the D.C. media world. In the past few days, Keith has responded to a flood of emails from people unhappy about their table location.

“Many people are going to be sitting at tables that they don’t think correctly acknowledge their importance and stature. And that’s really tough,” Keith said. “It’s impossible for me to convince anyone that your table placement is not a value judgment.”

The other big clout marker for news outlets is which senior administration officials they get as guests. News outlets can get competitive with each other and the highest ranking officials tend to pick who they want to attend the dinner with.

West Wing Playbook pulled together a list of who some White House officials will be sitting with next Saturday at the Washington Hilton:

POLITICO
Director of the Office of Management and Budget SHALANDA YOUNG
Senior adviser GENE SPERLING
Senior adviser MITCH LANDRIEU
Deputy Attorney General LISA MONACO

CBS
Homeland Security Secretary ALEJANDRO MAYORKAS
FBI Director CHRIS WRAY

NBC
Commerce Secretary GINA RAIMONDO
Ambassador to the U.N. LINDA THOMAS-GREENFIELD
Communications director BEN LABOLT
SBA Administrator ISABELLA CASILLAS GUZMAN
Deputy press secretary EMILIE SIMONS

WALL STREET JOURNAL
Senior adviser MIKE DONILON
Senior adviser and staff secretary NEERA TANDEN
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. MARK MILLEY
Adviser to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Col. DAVE BUTLER

ABC
Secretary of State ANTONY BLINKEN
Secretary of Education MIGUEL CARDONA
Deputy communications director HERBIE ZISKEND

USA TODAY
Director of the Office of Public Engagement STEVE BENJAMIN
National Security Council spokesperson JOHN KIRBY
National Security Council director for the Western Hemisphere JUAN GONZALEZ

NPR
Covid response coordinator ASHISH JHA
Under secretary of Defense for policy COLIN KAHL

WASHINGTON POST
Domestic Policy Council director SUSAN RICE
Homeland security adviser LIZ SHERWOOD-RANDALL

LOS ANGELES TIMES
Deputy communications director KATE BERNER
Press secretary to the vice president KIRSTEN ALLEN

REAL CLEAR POLITICS
Deputy press secretary ANDREW BATES
Treasury Department senior spokesperson MEGAN APPER

BLOOMBERG
State Department Chief of Protocol RUFUS GIFFORD

NEWSNATION
Assistant press secretary KELLY SCULLY

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This one is from Allie. Which president did American author WASHINGTON IRVING once describe as “a withered little apple-john?”

(Answer at bottom.)

TFIG! It’s cartoon feature time! This one is by WARD SUTTON. Our very own MATT WUERKER publishes a selection of cartoons from all over the country.

WHAT’S COOKIN? The White House invited Korean American celebrity chef EDWARD LEE to be the “guest chef” for next week’s state dinner honoring South Korean President YOON SUK YEOL, AP’s DARLENE SUPERVILLE reports. Entertainment after the dinner will include Broadway actors NORM LEWIS, LEA SALONGA and JESSICA VOSK.

SPOTTED: The American and South Korean flags outside of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building Friday:

FYI… Communications director Ben LaBolt took to Twitter to let folks know what food was being served at the White House Friday: “Vienna beef hot dogs, Italian beef, and ‘Chi Town Pizza’ (unclear if deep dish or tavern style).”

WHAT THE WHITE HOUSE WANTS YOU TO READ: This PAUL KRUGMAN column: “Making Manufacturing Greater Again.” One of the president’s favorite columnists, Krugman writes that “Biden appears to be presiding over the kind of manufacturing surge Trump had promised,” noting that “hardly a week goes by without the announcement of plans to build a major new factory in response to Biden-era legislation.” The White House press office blasted out the column via email Friday.

WHAT THE WHITE HOUSE DOESN’T WANT YOU TO READ: Anything about the president’s son, HUNTER BIDEN. CNN’s KYLIE ATWOOD and MARY KAY MALLONEE report that GOP investigations are intensifying. The Republican chairs of the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees sent a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday “asking for information related to the crafting of a public letter signed weeks before the 2020 presidential election by dozens of former intelligence officials, who said they saw signs the Hunter Biden laptop story could be Russian disinformation.”

AND ALSO… They definitely would prefer you not read the NYT’s MICHAEL SHEAR on how Biden has held fewer press conferences than any predecessor over the last century except RONALD REAGAN and RICHARD NIXON. The White House doesn’t dispute the numbers, with LaBolt explaining that people consume news differently these days and that Biden is simply meeting Americans where they are.

But the White House “has taken steps to reduce opportunities for journalists to question him in forums where he can offer unscripted answers and they can follow up,” Shear writes, noting Biden has been happy to take questions from, well, others.

“In the past few months, Mr. Biden has sat for separate, lengthy interviews with the actors Jason Bateman and Drew Barrymore, the weatherman Al Roker, and Manny MUA, a beauty blogger on YouTube. Ms. Barrymore’s opening question during her interview was about whether Mr. Biden was a good gift giver to his wife, prompting a long conversation about the poems that he writes for the first lady every year.”

PERSONNEL MOVES: BRITTANY CAPLIN is now deputy chief of staff at the Commerce Department. She was previously Commerce’s public affairs director. She’s also a former White House assistant press secretary. LUIS JIMENEZ, Commerce’s previous deputy chief of staff, is now senior counselor to the secretary.

(ENVIRONMENTAL) JUSTICE FOR ALL: Biden signed an executive order Friday that aims to tackle part of the administration’s larger environmental justice goals, “tightening up environmental approvals for new projects that would add pollution to communities that are already suffering from health threats from their air and water,” our ZACK COLMAN reports.

THE AI CRAZE CONTINUES: Homeland Security Secretary ALEJANDRO MAYORKAS announced Friday the establishment of a “new artificial intelligence task force to study how the powerful technology behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT can be tapped to combat a range of national security threats,” our JOHN SAKELLARIADIS reports for Pro subscribers.

MEANWHILE, IN UKRAINE: Defense Secretary LLOYD AUSTIN on Friday said Ukrainian troops “will begin training on American M1 Abrams tanks in Germany in the next few weeks,” NYT’s HELENE COOPER reports. “U.S. defense officials said that about 31 tanks were expected to arrive in Germany to kick off a training program for Ukrainian troops that is expected to take 10 weeks. The tanks could reach the battlefields in Ukraine by the fall.”

CIA in Congress’ crosshairs over alleged mishandling of sex assault cases (POLITICO’s Daniel Lippman)

Washington’s Angriest Progressive Is Winning Over Conservatives – and Baffling Old Allies (Nancy Scola for POLITICO Magazine)

America Fails the Civilization Test (The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson)

Vice President KAMALA HARRIS’ take on “Veep,” the former HBO program?

“She loves the show,” said its lead actress JULIA LOUIS-DREYFUS. “She said, ‘I love the show, it’s incredible. It’s like real life.’”

“I said, ‘I know, it is. Do you want me to get you out of here?’” Louis-Dreyfus said on CONAN O’BRIEN’s “Needs a Friend” podcast, adding that Harris had a sense of humor about the remark.

“They’re just people, trying to get the job done, you know?” she said.

JAMES MADISON was dubbed “a withered little apple-john” by Irving, a dig at “his deficiencies in charm,” according to the White House website.

A CALL OUT — Do you think you have a harder trivia question? Send us your best one about the presidents with a citation and we may feature it.

Edited by Eun Kyung Kim and Sam Stein.