Essay On The White House Office

The president’s closest advisors work with him in the Executive Office. The president’s main advisory body is his Cabinet – which he appoints – but the White House Office and the Bureau of Budget also have an important part to play in supporting the president.

The 1930’s and 1940’s witnessed a great growth in Federal bureaucracy. From this time, unelected officials from this bureaucracy have proved on occasions to be in competition with the president. Likewise, a president has to keep a close eye on the unelected Cabinet Secretaries who head each Executive department – virtually an impossible task due to the size of the Executive staff and the frequency with which these personnel have to be left to operate without someone metaphorically looking over their shoulders. Though those who head the Executive are hand picked by the president, he still needs as much skill in handling these people as he does with handling Congress.

One of the problems that a president faces, is how to get his staff to do what he wants them to do – they might have different

Within the EOP exists an elite called the White House Office in which can be found the president’s closest personal staff. The man who was behind the creation of the EOP in the 1930’s was Louis Brownlow who, as a distinguished scholar, had been asked to investigate the whole aspect of government management. He decreed that members of the White House Office should be “possessed of high competence, great physical vigour and a passion for anonymity.” In a classic example of how Congress and the president can work together, Congress initially rejected the creation of a White House Office in 1937 fearing that it might create a parallel bureaucracy. After amendments by the president and his staff, the bill went back to Congress which swiftly passed it in 1939 as the Reorganisation