The Chief Executive

Surprisingly to those of us who have grown up assuming a large White House organization was the original intention, the idea of a well-staffed chief executive organization is a relatively recent phenomenon dating from the late 1930s and the Franklin Roosevelt presidency. Roosevelt inherited a presidency with virtually no staff and budget; the White House was mostly a dwelling place, not the combination home and office it is today. As the administrative state grew by leaps and bounds in the 1930s, Roosevelt found he had almost no capacity to coordinate the operations of the growing executive branch. (This was not made easier by the highly pragmatic and political way the executive branch was expanding, with little attention to organizing new programs and agencies around some logical plan.) He relied on friends, relatives, a few top appointees requisitioned from departments to fulfill White House duties. Knowing he had a problem, he enlisted a group of top scholars in PA to come up with a plan. Called the Brownlow Committee after its chairman, Louis Brownlow, and staffed by experts in the field, the committee began its report with the words "the president needs help." Its plan was to emulate the organization of successful large corporations to provide the chief executive with adequate staff, both a personal staff that could be assigned work on an ad hoc basis and staff units, such as the Bureau of the Budget (then part of the Treasury Department and only in existence since the 1920s), to provide ongoing assistance in managing the work of the executive branch.

As has been the case generally for PA, war and economic emergency have been the drivers of change in White House organization. During World War II, Roosevelt found it difficult to require cooperation and coordination between the military services fighting the war. (The navy, led by Admiral Ernest King, was especially problematic, in Roosevelt's opinion.)  After Roosevelt's death and the end of the war, the Department of Defense was created to provide a single department to coordinate the work of the different services, along with the National Security Council within the Executive Office of the President (also called the EOP, the term given to those staff units that report directly to the president). Other efforts to create coordinating units within the EOP, such as the Domestic Council and the Office of Policy Development, have had mixed success.

Each president has a wide range of options in organizing the White House staff in ways that fit their leadership and management approach. Many choose to have a strong chief of staff—in essence a deputy president—to control all staff operations and "guard the door" to the president. None have chosen to follow the so-called cabinet approach of convening all the heads of the cabinet-level units around a table to hammer out collective decisions. Ronald Reagan used a unique "troika" arrangement in his first term, with three top staffers sharing what in other presidencies would be the chief of staff role; it worked for him because the three individuals, Edwin Meese, James Baker, and Michael Deaver, put aside their personal agendas to serve the president loyally. In the George W. Bush administration, the chief of staff approach was employed but Vice President Richard Cheney assembled his own staff and functioned as a de facto deputy president, especially in the first years of the administration.

Regardless of how they organize the White House, all modern presidents have learned that controlling and directing the departments and agencies of the administrative state is a difficult, tiresome, yet essential aspect of the office.