Toluse Olorunnipa becomes White House bureau Chief

Toluse Olorunnipa becomes White House bureau Chief

Now to cover President Biden

Announcement from National Editor Matea Gold, Deputy National Editor Philip Rucker, Senior Politics Editor Dan Eggen, and White House Editor Naftali Bendavid:

We are excited to announce that Toluse Olorunnipa, one of our most versatile journalists and a seasoned reporter who has covered three presidencies, will be our next White House bureau chief.

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In his new position, Tolu will lead an all-star team covering the Biden White House as it navigates economic and political headwinds and foreign conflicts. He will build on his distinguished work examining the ground-level impact of government policies and practices, bringing an accountability lens to his coverage of the administration and chronicling how the president’s decisions shape the lives of Americans in a diverse array of communities.

Tolu is returning to the White House beat after the publication of his acclaimed book “His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice,” a groundbreaking biography and journalistic exploration of the Black experience in America that he co-wrote with Robert Samuels.

Tolu is a natural to succeed Ashley Parker as White House bureau chief. He deftly chronicled Donald Trump’s turbulent presidency, first for Bloomberg News and then for The Post, which he joined in 2019. He also covered the Obama White House for Bloomberg.

Starting in 2021, he wrote about the Biden administration as a political enterprise reporter, producing penetrating stories that examined the intersection of policy, politics and people. He led complex stories that examined the cost to taxpayers and the toll on democracy wrought by Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.

Tolu demonstrated his investigative and storytelling chops with a gripping chapter in the “George Floyd’s America” project about how systemic racism shaped Floyd’s life, a series that won a George Polk Award, the Peabody Award and the Shaufler Prize from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.

Building on that series, Tolu joined with Robert to write “His Name is George Floyd.” Based on more than 400 interviews — including one with Biden — the book has received rave reviews from the New York Times, the Atlantic, CNN, Oprah Daily, Amazon and others, and won praise from a wide range of figures, including Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Walter Isaacson.

Before joining The Post, Tolu worked at Bloomberg for five years, reporting on politics and policy from Washington and Florida. He started his career at the Miami Herald, where he covered real estate, natural disasters and crime.