What It's Like to Work at the White House

Some reflections

Introduction

I recorded several exit interviews after I departed the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy last month. These turned out well, I think, but the truth about me is that I have not truly reflected on an experience until I have written about it. Today’s essay constitutes my long-overdue reflections on my time working for the White House.

This essay is based upon extensive conversations I had with former and current White House staff during my time in government, as well as on similar essays I have read by others over the years. And of course, it draws from my own experience as Senior Policy Advisor for AI and Emerging Technology in the White House. With that said, this essay is not about gossip: I will not be describing any newsy anecdotes or anything of that sort. And when I do describe internal interactions I had, all names will remain anonymous.

Understanding “The White House”

“The White House” is a lossy abstraction. The name of the bureaucracy that encompasses “The White House” is the Executive Office of the President (EOP). The EOP is composed of many “components”: the National Security Council (NSC), the National Economic Council (NEC), the Office of Management and Budget OMB), and, where I worked, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). The Department of Government Efficiency, too, is a White House component, having previously been the Obama-era US Digital Service (the technical name of DOGE is the US DOGE Service). Wikipedia says that about 1,800 people work in the EOP, though I suspect this number is meaningfully lower under the Trump Administration.

Almost none of these personnel work in the building made of white sandstone known as “The White House.” Fewer still work in the White House’s West Wing. Instead they work in the White House Complex, most importantly the New and Old Executive Office Buildings, the latter of which is called today the Eisenhower Executive Office Building (EEOB). The vast majority of people who work for “The White House” work in these latter two office buildings. I worked in the EEOB, located across from the White House on a small, private street called West Executive Avenue.

Despite the geographic confusion, “The White House” usually refers as a metonym to the entirety of the EOP. And when people outside the EOP talk to an EOP staffer about some policy issue, they will say to their friends and colleagues that they spoke with “The White House” about the matter—even if all they really did was exchange text messages with a twenty-something EOP staffer whose security clearance does not even permit him to walk around the West Wing unescorted. Mostly I think this is because it’s convenient, and also because it sounds cool to say you “spoke with The White House.”

This social reality also means that everything you say and do as a White House staffer was said and done by “The White House.” This ends up being a tremendously difficult fact of life for the people whose desk resides within the metonym. You are no longer, exactly, a person. You are transformed into a symbol, a walking embodiment of power. This affects how people treat you, and sadly, I think, it affects how you treat others.

Working at the White House Complex is like orbiting within a solar system. The closer you get to the sun in the center—the President himself—the temperature rises, and the intensity of the gravity increases. The EEOB is a nice middle ground—not an icy, distant planet, but also not, you know, Venus. Still, everyone in the EOP constantly surveils for the occasional coronal mass ejection from the Sun—that is, when something you work on reaches POTUS-level attention. The pace and character of your workday can change at a moment’s notice—from “wow-this-is-a-lot” to “unbelievably,-no-seriously-you-cannot-fathom-the-pressure” levels of intense.

The First Day

When you arrive for your first day of work at EOP, you are given a badge, a laptop, a phone, and some trinkets. There is an ethics briefing, where you are informed, among other things, that you must fill out a three-page form every time you want to go to an event of any kind. If, like me, you work in an EOP component that is also an “agency” for legal purposes (determined by a three-part test established by court precedent), you learn that every communication you have on official devices is subject to the Freedom of Information Act. This means that your most bitter political enemies (or the President’s) have a legal right to examine everything you say on official, unclassified communications media and to report it to the public with as much (or as little) context as they wish.

On my first day, I saw a friend I had known from before I “went in” walking in the hallway. This friend had also “gone in,” though not to the White House. “I’m so glad you’re inside,” he said to me. It was a warm exchange, but when I reflected on it later that evening, I realized its similarity to the language used among prisoners to describe their time of incarceration—the “inside” and the mentioned-only-by-implication “outside.” You are not, wholly, a free man during your time in public service, and most especially not if you happen to occupy the White House Complex.

And then the emails start to roll in. A senior State Department official will be in Indonesia tomorrow, and you need to “clear” the remarks on behalf of your component within the next two hours. Another department discovered they have $27 million in unspent funds dedicated to “technology modernization” that need to be spent within the next three months, and the department would like to spend the funds in X way. But what spending would you, “The White House,” recommend (by the way, unsaid here is that there are in fact numerous statutory constraints on this funding, and you must know them all to answer well)? As you ponder these first inquiries, you’ll get word that three large-GDP countries are sending delegations to Washington next week to discuss “US-country AI collaboration”; what should our priorities be? And there’s a briefing on semiconductor strategy coming up; would you like to speak? It’s tomorrow morning. Three Hill offices will have reached out for technical assistance on some proposed legislation. And oh, by the way, 27 interest groups and lobbyists have reached out for meetings.

And then you realize it’s lunch time.

On your first day, you may be lucky enough to have 20, or maybe even 30, luxurious minutes to think about these types of inquiries. By week two, you’ll have closer to 10 minutes. By the end of month one, you’ll have 5 minutes, if you’re lucky—but more likely negative time—available for this type of inquiry.

Once the news of your EOP employment becomes public, you should expect for, to a first approximation, everyone you’ve ever known to contact you. Former colleagues, long-lost friends from high school and college, that one guy you met at a conference in Grand Rapids that one time in 2015. Everyone will reach out, sometimes with sincere congratulations, sometimes (especially in this administration) with castigations, sometimes with requests for your attention, and sometimes merely to say they have a buddy in “The White House.” There is something about working for the President that reveals the more primitive instincts of your fellow man.

The Work of the White House Staffer

So what do you do all day, exactly? It’s a great question. Outside of offices like the NSC and OMB, most White House components do not have much or any hard power. They have no written-in-statute capabilities, other than “providing advice.” They have no shalls at their disposal, only shoulds. So your power rests entirely in soft varieties: mandates, real or perceived, from senior officials, ideally POTUS; proximity, real or perceived, to the President himself.

The other path to soft power is simply by being useful, by solving other people’s problems for them, or by being the person who simply must be a part of that meeting because of your expertise and insight.

A good White House staffer, I think, does both. Fortunately, at OSTP, we had the unambiguous mandate: early in his administration, President Trump had tasked us with drafting a strategy for America to achieve “dominance” of AI. This, of course, is the AI Action Plan. This was my mandate. Of course I was not the sole author—not by a mile—but I did hold the pen from a blank sheet of paper to finished product.

Being a writer first and foremost, during my first two or so weeks I spent a disproportionate amount of time in front of my computer, writing the first draft of what became the AI Action Plan. I had a pretty good idea of the basics I wanted to cover, and through intensive research (another luxury you have before you become powerful), I filled in the gaps in my knowledge. This first draft was not, in the grand scheme of things, that different from the final document we shipped. But it turns out that writing such a document is, by far, the easiest part of the process.

The hard part is reaching the desired end state—“clearance”—by a pre-set deadline. The White House, by itself, does not “do” much public administration. It doesn’t run programs, award grants, revoke or approve licenses, or anything much like that. Instead, it “coordinates” policy, and this it does primarily through the inherent “convening power” that the White House holds. This is basically the ability to call meetings—of private sector firms and civil society, yes, but most importantly of all the agencies that actually do public administration. This latter ability manifests itself in the “interagency process,” referred to, somewhat ominously, as “the interagency.”

Running an interagency process is not that hard—at least, it is not hard to summarize. You want to avoid excessive “policymaking by committee” while also ensuring that agencies have the opportunity to bring legitimate nuance and detail to the table—characteristics that only they, with their subject-matter expertise, can furnish.

To do this you need to identify all the agencies relevant to your policy process (itself nontrivial!); find productive counterparties in those agencies and cultivate them as allies; develop a rich model not just of your counterparty’s incentives and goals but also those of his entire team and agency; and build a model also of the tensions between each counterparty/agency’s incentives and goals and those of all the other counterparties and agencies.

Then, you need to engage in behind-the-scenes diplomacy to “pre-bake” all the major things you care about achieving. Your goal should be for the interagency meeting itself to be a coronation of the already-agreed-upon major policy objectives, and a nuanced discussion of the details of implementation. You’ll need to do this focused work for each interagency process you run while also dealing with all the reactive elements of White House staffing (the Indonesia speech and the nebulous government-to-government negotiations and the lobbying and what not).

Some agencies are easy to work with. Others are almost entirely incorrigible. The most difficult ones are those that centralize communications with the White House, such that the EOP staffer can only get information filtered through the top-level offices of the agency. “Solving” each agency is a unique problem unto itself.

My first interagency meeting was a disaster, saved only by an exceptionally competent West Wing staffer whom I will not name but for whom I have enduring gratitude and tremendous admiration. By my second or third, I was getting the hang of it. After my fourth meeting, a veteran staffer came up to me afterward and said, “man, you ran the fuck out of that meeting.”

There is nothing like the feeling of success in the White House. The firm handshake from the senior staffer, the pat on the back after the meeting from your teammate. The feeling of grasping the levers of government, pulling down hard, and watching the machine—the United States, do what you asked it to. The feeling of walking the halls of power after having just run the fuck out of a White House interagency process, onto the next thing. Negotiating with the Swedes, is it? Bring it on. It is rock and roll, electricity itself.

The word I came to over and over again to describe the feeling of working at the White House was “dopaminergic.”

Through the highs and the lows you come to realize what it is to be a mid-senior level White House staffer. You are a lone man, attached to the hull of a gargantuan ship, so large you cannot even see the ends. Your goal is to make it to the engine room, or the bridge, or to whatever else in the ship you feel it is your job to fix or improve. First you have to make it through the hull, and in your hands you have a butter knife.

The job is not just hard. In the final analysis, it is effectively impossible to do completely. But you can make inches of progress, and inches are not nothing. Despite the glamor and the flashes of glory, the work is mostly toil, if you are doing it right (not everyone does). There is a reason, after all, it is called public service.

Nonetheless, it is easy to become dispirited, to become overwhelmed by the enormity of your task and the problems you are trying to solve. In Washington, doing this too much is referred to as “admiring the problem.” That many in our nation’s capital treat understanding problems with such derision perhaps sheds light on why Americans are so often dissatisfied with their solutions.

Conclusion

But then there are the culminating events. In my case, that came on July 23^rd, the day the Action Plan was unveiled. We had five cabinet secretaries, the Vice President, and the President speaking. It is nearly impossible to have more star power at a policy launch event of this sort. Backstage in the VIP area were CEOs and celebrities. I felt in a daze all day—all these people here, the whole world watching, in no small part brought together by these little words I typed on a Dell keyboard into Microsoft Word in 11-point Calibri.

I moved into the main auditorium for the opening, sitting in the front row. An introduction movie played. I remember clips of American technology triumph of eras past—the moon landing, factories building planes by the thousands for the Second World War, all that. But most of all I remember hearing the voice of my childhood hero, Steve Jobs—a clip from his famous monologue describing computers as “bicycles for the mind.”

This metaphor has animated my career in technology policy, defined my relationship with technology, and will, I hope, define my children’s relationship with technology. Hearing those words in this moment, I nearly cried. “For you, Steve,” I thought.

Later, the President came on stage. He announced the AI Action Plan and signed the Executive Orders whose drafting I led. And then it was done. Onto the next thing, for the President, for the members of the Executive staff, and, indeed, for me.