White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday that President Joe Biden remains confident that 88-year-old Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein can do her job.

‘Yes, she’s a longtime friend, a proud public servant, and someone he has long enjoyed serving with and working with,’ Psaki told the press briefing.

Feinstein, one of the longest-serving senators, had long been renowned in Washington for an issue-focused passion and quick wit, but now people who have worked with the California lawmaker for years say she has difficulty recognizing them and repeats the same few talking points.

On Thursdsay, Feinstein said she wouldn’t step down from her position before it ends in 2024, despite democratic colleagues saying they’re concerned she’s ‘mentally unfit to serve.’

Feinstein, 88, said she ‘regularly’ meets with leaders and isn’t ‘isolated,’ after four senators – three of them Democrats – a California Congress member, and three former staffers said that her short-term memory is deteriorating.

‘I see people. My attendance is good. I put in the hours. We represent a huge state. And so I’m rather puzzled by all of this,’ she told the San Francisco Chronicle.

The senator said no one had brought up these concerns to her directly.

‘No, that conversation has not happened,’ she told the Chronicle. ‘The real conversation is whether I’m an effective representative for 40 million people.’

Psaki wouldn’t say whether the president reached out to Feinstein to signal his support after the initial San Francisco Chronicle report was published last week.

‘I don’t have any updates on private conversations,’ she said.

Talk has been floated of persuading her to resign before her current term ends in 2024.

A staffer from another senator’s office has also been quoted saying they’ve seen their boss go out of their way to re-introduce themselves to Feinstein before speaking to her.

‘We’ve got an ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ problem here,’ an unnamed California lawmaker said, referencing a fable about fearing to speak truth to power.

‘I have worked with her for a long time and long enough to know what she was like just a few years ago: always in command, always in charge, on top of the details, basically couldn’t resist a conversation where she was driving some bill or some idea. All of that is gone,’ they said.

The member of Congress described an hours-long conversation in which they had to reintroduce themselves to the veteran senator multiple times and circling back to the same questions without any indication she knew they’d already covered it.

The lawmaker said: ‘She was an intellectual and political force not that long ago, and that’s why my encounter with her was so jarring. Because there was just no trace of that.’

That and the other interactions described in the report occurred before the death of Feinstein’s husband in February of this year.

These so-called ‘memory lapses’ are punctuated by days where Feinstein is ‘nearly as sharp as she used to be,’ the Chronicle reports. ‘But some close to her said that on her most difficult days, she does not seem to fully recognize even longtime colleagues.’

One Democrat senator said: ‘It’s bad, and it’s getting worse.’