The Executive Office of the President EOP

In 1937 a committee of public administration scholars delivered a report to Franklin Roosevelt that opened with three words: the President needs help. For 150 years presidents had run the government with a handful of clerks and secretaries, borrowing staff from the departments. The New Deal had made that impossible. The Reorganization Act of 1939 and Executive Order 8248, signed on September 8 of that year, created the Executive Office of the President, a permanent institutional staff answering to the President alone. It began with six units. It now holds more than a dozen, with a combined workforce of several thousand.

The two largest pieces are the White House Office and the Office of Management and Budget. The White House Office is the President's personal staff: the chief of staff, the counsel, the press secretary, the speechwriters, and the policy advisers, none of whom need Senate confirmation. OMB, moved into the EOP from the Treasury in 1939 and renamed in 1970, assembles the President's annual budget, reviews every agency's regulations and legislative proposals, and tells the rest of the executive branch what the administration's position is. A rule or a bill that OMB has not cleared does not officially exist.

Around those two sit the councils. The National Security Council, created by the National Security Act of 1947, brings the President, Vice President, and the secretaries of State and Defense together with the national security advisor and a staff that coordinates diplomacy, defense, and intelligence. The Council of Economic Advisers, from 1946, supplies the economics. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative negotiates trade agreements. The Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Council on Environmental Quality, the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the Domestic Policy Council, and the National Economic Council each give the President an in-house view that does not depend on a cabinet department.

The EOP exists so that the President is not a prisoner of the departments. Its staff can see across agency lines, referee disputes between them, and push the President's priorities against bureaucratic resistance. Critics note that the same design concentrates enormous power in unconfirmed aides, that the budget and regulatory review functions give the White House a veto over the whole government, and that the national security staff has at times run operations Congress never authorized. Most of the EOP works in the West Wing and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door.