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

Send tips | Subscribe here | Email Eli | Email Lauren

It’s a universally accepted fact of the pandemic era: Zoom is superior to Webex.

At least, that’s the widely-held belief by White House staffers. After working remotely through the presidential transition and the first few months of President JOE BIDEN’s administration, many had grown accustomed to conducting a lot of their work over Zoom. (Google Hangouts was the preferred method of communication during the campaign.)

So when AUSTIN LIN, director of technology, sent a staff-wide email on Jan. 30 informing everyone the White House would be switching from Zoom to Webex, it did not go over well.

“People were like, ‘What is happening?’” said a White House aide. “People would roll their eyes and groan about it.”

In the email, Lin said that while Webex would be “eventually replacing Zoom” as the White House’s “primary video conferencing solution,” he reassured staff that “not much” would change. Many of the same features that people liked — virtual backgrounds, for example — would be available on Webex, he said. Lin even included a three-page, step-by-step guide on how to use Webex.

Lin told staff that the switch would not be immediate. They had until May 1 before their Zoom Pro accounts would be deactivated and, even then, they would still be able to join Zoom meetings hosted by others in the administration or outside organizations.

But despite his best efforts to make the transition as seamless as possible, the complaints continued. “No explanation was given [for the change],” complained one former White House official.

After the switch was finally made, the sadness and dread turned to full on bemoaning.

“Webex just sucks,” said another current White House aide. “But then again, the government isn’t really known for being on the cutting edge of IT.”

Other staffers also grumbled about how Webex is not nearly as user-friendly as Zoom. The app can be glitchy, they said, and the meeting interface is more challenging to navigate for less tech-savvy administration officials.

A spokesperson for Cisco, Webex’s parent company, did not respond to a request for comment before publication.

Although the White House is back to working in person, staffers said that a lot of meetings are still conducted virtually. Some staffers said they refused to transition to Webex and have kept using the free version of Zoom, which doesn’t allow meetings to go over 40 minutes.

“It has definitely kept meetings efficient,” said a third current White House aide.

When asked why the White House changed to Webex, an official said that it was a cost-related decision and did not have to do with security factors or compliance with public records laws.

Each federal agency decides which conference tool it wants to use for official business. When asked for their thoughts on White House staffers’ frustrations with Webex, one administration staffer who works at an agency said: “it could always be worse.”

“They should just be glad they aren’t us,” the person said, noting that they had to hop off the phone with West Wing Playbook to join a, shudder, Microsoft Teams meeting.

MESSAGE US — Are you Zoom CEO ERIC YUAN? We want to hear from you. And we’ll keep you anonymous! Email us at [email protected]

Did someone forward this email to you? Subscribe here!

This one’s from Allie. Who was the first president to attend a Major League Baseball game?

(Answer at bottom.)

DESCRIBE BIDEN’S REACTION TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: The president has “experimented with ChatGPT and was fascinated,” Axios’ MIKE ALLEN reports, in a story that was not generated by an AI bot. The news comes as the White House held a meeting Thursday with the CEOs of Google, Microsoft and OpenAI and unveiled steps to regulate AI technology.

HARRIS HITS PETWORTH: Vice President KAMALA HARRIS paid an unexpected visit Wednesday to Home Rule Records in D.C.’s Petworth neighborhood (getting up to that part of town is a lot easier when you’ve got a motorcade).

There was little media coverage of the stop, but UPI published a photo showing the Veep high-fiving a young customer. We inquired as to what Harris bought, and here’s the haul according to deputy press secretary ERNIE APREZA: Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong’s Porgy and Bess studio album from 1959; Charles Mingus’ 1972 avant-garde Let My Children Hear Music; and Roy Ayers’ timeless 1976 album Everybody Loves the Sunshine.

WHAT THE WHITE HOUSE WANTS YOU TO READ: This straightforward Reuters report on testimony by Moody’s Analytics’ MARK ZANDI to Congress Thursday on the potential impact of the House GOP’s spending reduction proposal. Senate Democrats arranged the hearing ahead of Biden’s meeting next week with congressional leaders, aiming to strengthen their hand. Zandi told the Senate Budget Committee that the Republican plan “would lower employment, slow economic growth and ‘meaningfully increase’ the likelihood of a recession,” Reuters’ ANDY SULLIVAN and MOIRA WARBURTON wrote.

WHAT THE WHITE HOUSE DOESN’T WANT YOU TO READ: This piece by CNN’s GREGORY KRIEG and EVA MCKEND about how Biden’s reelection is a “hard sell” for Gen Z voters. Voters ages 18 to 29 “are ardent opponents of the right’s political and cultural agenda — a reality that could ultimately prevail over disappointment with Biden — but also determined to make leading Democrats, many of them five or six decades older, earn their support.”

CORPORATE AMERICA STAYS MUM: Although the debt ceiling debacle could greatly impact U.S. businesses, NBC News’ KAYLA TAUSCHE, SHANNON PETTYPIECE and KRISTEN WELKER note that “corporate America is sitting this one out — at least publicly, and at least for now.”

LOOK. IT’S NOT OUR DRONE, MAN: Biden administration officials maintained Wednesday that the U.S. was not involved in the coordinated drone attacks on Moscow, as the Kremlin’s spokesperson DMITRY PESKOV recently alleged, our MATT BERG reports. Russia said the move was an assassination attempt on President VLADIMIR PUTIN. “I can assure you that there was no involvement by the United States. Whatever it was, it didn’t involve us,” National Security Council spokesperson JOHN KIRBY said on MSNBC.

IT’S NOT JUST A BOARD GAME: Assistant Attorney General JONATHAN KANTER and Federal Trade Commission chair LINA KHAN, two of the top antitrust officials in the Biden administration, said they have public support to better tackle the “monopoly problem,” our MARCIA BROWN and JOSH SISCO report for Pro subscribers. “I worry about a trend that we’ve seen in recent decades where enforcers have left the text of the statute unenforced, have decided that, you know, the words on the page don’t matter,” Khan said at an event Thursday.

TITLE 42.0: Sens. KYRSTEN SINEMA (I-Ariz.) and THOM TILLIS (R-N.C.) are teaming up on legislation “that would grant a temporary two-year authority to expel migrants from the U.S. similar to what is currently allowed under Title 42, a law that permits the U.S. to deny asylum and migration claims for public health reasons,” as it’s set to expire May 11 and the administration is scrambling for solutions, DANIELLA DIAZ and JORDAIN CARNEY report.

SUDAN SANCTIONS: Biden issued a new executive order Thursday authorizing sanctions on individuals responsible for the destabilizing violence in Sudan undermining the country’s transition to a democratic regime. “The violence taking place in Sudan is a tragedy — and it is a betrayal of the Sudanese people’s clear demand for civilian government and a transition to democracy,” Biden said in a statement accompanying the order.

Clarence Thomas Had a Child in Private School. Harlan Crow Paid the Tuition. (ProPublica’s Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski)

Why Jill Biden Is Attending the Coronation Instead of the President (Time’s Brian Bennett)

China Could Soon Be the Dominant Military Power in Asia (Michael Schuman for The Atlantic)

BENJAMIN HARRISON was the first president to attend a Major League Baseball game in 1892, when Cincinnati beat Washington 7-4, according to the MLB 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.