Do White House Chiefs of Staff “manage up”?

Abstract

The White House Chief of Staff (COS) has become the modern presidency's organizational lynchpin, the position tasked with helping presidents “faithfully execute the Office of President.” Extending a rich literature about how chiefs manage White House staffers, we consider the other side of the coin: can a COS manage the president? We begin theoretically, sketching three mechanisms—offloading, streamlining, and steering—by which a COS could shape presidents' basic workways. We test resulting hypotheses against original data on presidents' daily work behaviors from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush—a total spanning 48 years, nine presidencies, and 21 Chiefs of Staff (plus one sustained vacancy). Surprisingly, we find little evidence that Chiefs of Staff affected the duration, density, or composition of their president's workday. When it comes to the basic contours of presidential workways, it appears Chiefs of Staff do less “managing up” and more “managing around.”