page_title: White House Chief of Staff
section_title: Role
hierarchical_section_title: White House Chief of Staff / Role
caption_attribution_description: President George H. W. Bush sits at his desk in the Oval Office Study and talks on the telephone regarding Operation Just Cause in Panama as General Brent Scowcroft and White House Chief of Staff John Sununu stand nearby.
context_page_description: The White House chief of staff position is the successor to the earlier role of the President's private secretary. The role was formalized as the assistant to the president in 1946 and acquired its current title in 1961. The current official title is Assistant to the President and Chief of Staff.
  The chief of staff is a political appointee of the president who does not require Senate confirmation, and who serves at the pleasure of the president. While not a legally required role, all presidents since Harry Truman have appointed chiefs of staff, with the exception of Presidents Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, whose appointments were to the office of White House Appointments Secretary, a role subsumed into that of Chief of Staff.
  In the administration of Donald Trump, the current chief of staff is Mark Meadows, who succeeded Mick Mulvaney on March 31, 2020.
context_section_description: Chris Whipple, author of The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency, loosely describes the role of a White House chief of staff through his interview with former president Barack Obama: "During the last days of his presidency, Barack Obama observed: 'One of the things I've learned is that the big breakthroughs are typically the result of a lot of grunt work—just a whole lot of blocking and tackling.' Grunt work is what chiefs of staff do."
  The responsibilities of the chief of staff are both managerial and advisory and can include the following:
  Select key White House staff and supervise them;
  Structure the White House staff system;
  Control the flow of people into the Oval Office;
  Manage the flow of information;
  Protect the interests of the president;
  Negotiate with Congress, other members of the executive branch, and extra-governmental political groups to implement the president's agenda; and
  Advise the president on various issues, including telling the president what they do not want to hear.
  These responsibilities extend to firing of staff members: in the case of Omarosa Manigault Newman, who published a tape she said was made in the Situation Room of her firing by Chief of Staff John Kelly, the chief of staff said that his decision for her departure was non-negotiable and that "the staff and everyone on the staff works for me and not the president."
  Richard Nixon's first chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, garnered a reputation in Washington for the iron hand he wielded in the position—famously referring to himself as "the president's son-of-a-bitch", he was a rigid gatekeeper who would frequently meet with administration officials in place of the president, and then report himself to Nixon on the officials' talking points. Journalist Bob Woodward, in his books All the President's Men and The Secret Man, wrote that many of his sources, including the famous Deep Throat, displayed a genuine fear of Haldeman.
caption: President George H. W. Bush sits at his desk in the Oval Office Study and talks on the telephone regarding Operation Just Cause, as Chief of Staff John Sununu and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft stand nearby (December 20, 1989).
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