The White House Office

For most of the nineteenth century presidents paid their own secretaries, and Abraham Lincoln ran the Civil War with two of them. Congress first funded a White House staff in 1857 and expanded it slowly. The Brownlow Committee's 1937 report asked for six administrative assistants with a passion for anonymity, and when Franklin Roosevelt created the Executive Office of the President in 1939, the White House Office became its central unit, the people who work for the President personally rather than for an agency.

The White House Office is the West Wing staff. The chief of staff, a post Dwight Eisenhower formalized for Sherman Adams, manages the President's time, the flow of paper, and the rest of the staff. The White House Counsel advises on legal questions involving the presidency, though not the President personally. The press secretary and communications office speak for the administration. Other offices handle legislative affairs, presidential personnel, intergovernmental affairs, public liaison, scheduling, speechwriting, and the policy councils whose staffs draft domestic and economic initiatives. The Cabinet Secretary coordinates with the departments.

Roughly 400 to 500 people work in the White House Office. None of its members require Senate confirmation, and most can be hired and fired at will, which gives the President a loyal staff and gives Congress little direct oversight. Senior aides claim executive privilege over their communications with the President, a claim courts have partially limited. The staff is subject to the Hatch Act, the Presidential Records Act, and ethics rules, though enforcement against senior White House officials has been rare.

Every administration's White House Office takes on the President's character. Some have been run like disciplined corporations, others like rival courts, and the chief of staff's strength or weakness often shapes how well a presidency functions. Critics across eras argue that the staff has grown too large and too powerful relative to the cabinet secretaries the Senate confirmed. The current White House chief of staff, the first woman to hold the post, took office in January 2025.