American Government: Presidential Staff, Advisers

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We tend to think of the presidency in terms of its occupant, the person who we select to be president. But the reality, particularly in the modern era is that the presidency is not a "he'" or someday a "she," it's an "it." That is, the outputs produced by the presidency or function, not just the individual we select but also the myriad advisors that the president appoints to provide expert advice. Now, through much of the nation's history the presidents relied on something called the "Presidential Cabinet" as a source of that advice. The cabinet is nowhere mentioned in the Constitution. It's an extra constitutional development. That development took place in roughly three waves. Initial set of cabinet appointees were inherited from the government prior to the Constitution, the Articles of Confederation, and they consisted of the State Department, handling diplomatic relations, the Treasury Department, which oversaw the raising of revenue and spending of funds. An Attorney General, a chief law enforcement officer who through the years has been supported by what we now call the Justice Department, and also a War and Navy Department, two separate entities that in 1947 were merged into the Defense Department.
That was the original cabinet, the traditional cabinet. Since that time they've been supplemented by two additional waves of cabinet building. The second wave took place as our economy expanded in the late 19^th Century, became more industrialized, and so we developed economic sectors that needed representation in government. And so we see the creation of these specialized departments dealing with, for instance, farmers--the Agricultural Department, Commerce, Labor, and of course, Interior, dealing with issues affecting mostly western-based businesses like ranching and cattle.
The third great wave takes place in the 20^th century and here it's a reflection of changing technological developments dealing with particular issue areas, so we see Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Energy, Health and Human Services, actually an outgrowth of Health, Education, and Welfare created in the 1950's. In 1979, Education siphoned off into its own department, and so we have Health and Human Services and Education, and finally, Veteran Affairs.
Well, the great virtue of these Cabinet secretaries is they provided the president a direct link to the major agencies who implement his policies. But there were drawbacks to relying on the cabinet as a source of advice. For one, the cabinet is not a unified body. If you look at these departments and agencies, they're all dealing with different issues, and so from the president's perspective, he often finds that the advice he needs on one matter may have nothing to do with the issues that are the responsibility of many of his advisors. A second problem, the members of the Cabinet have divided loyalties. They have to enlist the support of the employees in their departments, and most of those employees are civil servants who are appointed or take office by virtue of passing specialized exams. They're not appointed by the president; they don't feel any loyalty to the president, and so the cabinet secretary says, "Who should I listen to, the civil servant or the president?"
And, of course, the other allegiance is owed to Congress. It's Congress that creates these departments, it's Congress which funds them, it's Congress which determines the policies they implement. So if you're in the cabinet, you find divided loyalties--to your civil servants, to the members of Congress, as well as to the president.
So for all these reasons, the Cabinet, through the years, has served as a source of advice of dubious loyalties. And what this has meant is increasingly presidents have turned elsewhere for advice. For one thing, they tended to fracture the Cabinet into what we might call sub-cabinets, devoted to particular issue areas. So rather than dealing with the whole cabinet, they may break down the cabinet and utilize only those secretaries who deal with national security affairs, like State or Defense. Or they may focus on those cabinets that deal with domestic affairs, such as Housing and Urban Development or Transportation or Commerce and Labor.
So one way of dealing with this increasingly large cabinet is to break it down into more unified subsections. Even here, however, you have the problem of divided loyalties. And so beginning in the 1930's presidents began to search elsewhere for sources of advice, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who oversaw the greatest expansion in the size of our national government of any president, appointed a special commission in 1937 consisting of academics, under the leadership of a man named Louis Brownlow. And he charged them with finding a plan for providing an institutionalized source of advice for the president, and they issued that report in 1937, and it served as the basis for the creation of what we now know as the Executive Office of the president. And the Executive Office of the president is essentially a holding company that consists of several staff agencies whose primary loyalty is to the president, and whose primary responsibilities are dealing with the great managerial functions related to the president's duties. And by managerial functions I mean the processes of budgeting, personnel, and policy planning.
So if we look through the key components of the Executive Office of the presidency today we see the Office of Management and Budget who is responsible for advising the president in terms of issues pertaining to the budget, but also policy in general. We see the Council of Economic Advisors. The Council of Economic Advisors is an agency composed of academics who provide advice to the president on economic matters. We see the National Security Council. Now, the National Security Council is one of those issue councils I talked about before, consisting of the State Department, the head of the Defense Department, the president, and the vice-president, but it's supported by huge staff apparatus, directed by an assistant to the president for national security affairs who provides the president with advice on national security and foreign policy issues.
By far, however, the most important staff agency within this Executive Office of the president is the White House staff. Now, the White House staff, formerly called the White House Office, also has its origins in the Brownlow committee report in 1937. But in the initial formulation by the Brownlow committee, the White House staff was supposed to be a very small component of the Executive Office of the presidency. It was to consist of a small number of advisors, small meaning a number low enough that the president knew each of these advisors personally, who would have no specialized functions, but, in fact, would be glorified office boys, and they would work behind the scenes. They would be anonymous. Well, as we can see from this chart, what started out under Roosevelt as a relatively small staff of roughly 50 people, has developed through the years into a rather large entity under William Clinton numbering over 500 people. Moreover, it's become increasingly specialized so that rather simply being glorified gophers; it now performs three essential functions. The first is administrative support. It's the White House staff that provides the secretarial assistance, that deals with the president's appointments, that schedules visitors and deals with correspondence. A second function--the primary responsibility for policy development has been taken away from the Cabinet council and moved into the White House, so the White House now draws up legislation on the president's behalf. And finally, it's the White House office that conducts legislative and political outreach, building coalitions to provide support for the president's legislative and policy initiatives.
Now, with the growth of this large White House Staff, the presidents have faced an additional responsibility. How can they ensure that these 500 advisors are working on the president's behalf? Well, historically, presidents have adopted one of two strategies. Strategy number one is to deal with your advisors in a collegial fashion to, in essence, be at the center of the White House organization. Your advisors would have overlapping duties, they would deal with you on a case-by-case basis, and you would be responsible for giving them assignments and auditing their reports. And for the most part this has been a strategy adopted by Democratic presidents like Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.
The Republican alternative, dating back to Dwight David Eisenhower, has been a much more formalistic, hierarchical approach in which your aides do not deal directly with the president, but instead channel communications and receive orders through a chain of command. And at the top of the pyramid is usually a chief of staff who manages the staff on your behalf. And again, this was the Eisenhower model, but Republicans have tended to emulate it, like Richard Nixon and Dwight David Eisenhower.
Finally, any discussion of advisors has to deal with an additional development, and that's the increased prominence of the vice-president. Beginning with Jimmy Carter and this vice-president, Walter Mondale, vice-presidents have become increasingly important as sources of advice and expertise to the presidents, so that by the time of William Jefferson Clinton, Al Gore was being given responsibility for many programs that were solely his charge, his responsibility. Clinton trusted him to do what he thought would be in Clinton's best interest, and we can expect this to continue under additional presidents.
Well, this look at the presidential office has taught us one important thing. The modern presidency differs from the traditional presidency in several respects, the most important one of which I think is the presidency today is no longer simply a personal office. Its behavior is governed in part by the policy preferences and the operating style of the individual we elect, but it's also a product of all those advisors that the president appoints. In short, the modern presidency is an institution, and this means when we select a president and look for the keys to success, increasingly, one of those keys is the degree to which a president can effectively manage a staff, can ensure that that staff is working to achieve a president's policy goals in ways that occur with the president's preferences as opposed to perhaps their own desires or their own interests.
Political Institutions
The Office of the President
The Presidential Staff and Advisors Page [2 of 3]