It was just before noon on Tuesday, and Kellyanne Conway’s eyes welled up with tears. Conway has remained indefatigably cheery during her stint in the White House despite the various recriminations that she may have brought upon herself via her “alternative facts” snafu; or her suggestion that Americans “go buy Ivanka’s stuff”; or her assertion that former N.S.A. director Michael Flynn enjoyed the “full confidence of the president“ shortly before he was jettisoned.

But seated at the bend of the long wooden table in the Cabinet Room, Conway cried as a young woman, Vanessa Vitolo, recounted to the assembled group her descent from private-school cheerleader and sorority girl to a heroin addict who lived on the streets of Atlantic City. “Three years ago, I didn’t have a place to live, and today I’m here to represent the light that can be born out of the defeat of this darkness,” Vitolo told the group. “There is hope, and there is a tomorrow, and there is a day after that. You just have to fight for it. And people have to know that there’s people fighting for them too, because you give up.”

For Conway, the story was personal on a number of levels. She had grown up in blue collar New Jersey, where she would famously become victor of the state’s Blueberry Princess Pageant. The opioid epidemic had also become a central focus for Conway since entering the White House as counselor to Donald Trump, whom she had been advising on the drug crisis and issues affecting veterans when she wasn’t serving as his chief surrogate on cable news. Indeed, the issue appeared critically important to the president, who successfully campaigned on it throughout the primary and general election. He would call her from the phone on his plane after campaign rallies to talk about someone sharing their story of drug abuse, and mothers would come up to her, give her a hug, and thank her for talking about the issue.

It was one of the few issues Conway had very publicly claimed as her own. “I have in my portfolio here veterans. I have women and children. I have opioid use, and we're working on all of that,” she told CNN’s Jake Tapper in an interview last month. A few days earlier, she reiterated this to Politico, too. Sources close to the White House told me earlier this year that Conway had also been encouraged to keep her attention on those issues by Jared Kushner, a senior adviser and son-in-law to the president, who sensed that Conway had no clear role in the administration otherwise. He was “helping her find things to focus on,” one person told me at the time.

But less than three months into the White House, Conway’s portfolio appears diminished, as Kushner’s own has ballooned. On Sunday, the Trump administration announced that Kushner would now lead the newly formed White House Office of American Innovation—a large and somewhat amorphous “SWAT Team” that The Washington Post reported includes both veterans affairs and the opioid issue. Kushner, it seemed, had taken a bite out of Conway’s job. And this maneuver merely resurfaced a question that has been simmering around the Trump inner circle for months: What does Kellyanne Conway do when she is not on TV?

Even in the White House, there has been a growing lack of clarity. “There is some confusion about what she does day to day,” one White House aide told me. “She has an agenda of the issues she wants to work on and is very passionate about and plans to help out with. But it’s less clear how she’s working on them on a daily basis.”