One major result of the Brownlow Committee study was the passage of the Reorganization Act of 1939 which formed the legal basis for Reorganization Plan me No. 1 and Executive Order 8248 of September 8, 1939 which established the Executive Office of the President with an expanded White House Office as one of its ingredients..
we Since 1939, the Executive Office of the President has grown at a rapid pace. Since it is our purpose here to deal only with the White House Office, it is enough to say that the White House Office expansion is illustrative of what was happening in the entire Executive Office. The Executive Office. has now overflowed the
State, War and Navy building which a few years earlier had housed three major departments.
President Grant operated the White House Office on a budget of $13,800 anda total of six employees. McKinley had a budget of $44,340 and a total staff of. twenty-seven. Coolidge’s White House had forty-six employees operating on a budget of $93,520. When the Brownlow Committee made its report in 1937, Roosevelt had thirty-seven employees in the White House Office and a budget of about $200,000. By 1967 the budget had increased to nearly three million dollars. The total White House staff for 1966 has been estimated to be 2,845.
Table I. White House Office Budget, 1937–1967
| Fiscal year | Total Personnel | Total Obligations Incurred |
|---|---|---|
| 1937 | 109,222 | 200,000 E* |
| 1938 | 128,759 | 211,380 |
| 1939 | 126,066 | 213,160 |
| 1940 | 145,842 | 222,900 |
| 1941 | 172,005 | 222,800 |
| 1942 | 164,448 | 224,860 |
| 1943 | 180,782 | 226,210 |
| 1944 | 225,789 | 302,190 |
| 1945 | 235,643 | 339,131 |
| 1946 | 250,996 | 342,588 |
| 1947 | 772,122 | 848,507 |
| 1948 | 1,067,200 | 1,194,502 |
| 1949 | 1,023,060 | 1,123,843 |
| 1950 | 1,185,660 | 1,304,735 |
| 1951 | 1,367,294 | 1,495,699 |
| 1952 | 1,446,264 | 1,609,398 |
| 1953 | 1,525,290 | 1,732,324 |
| 1954 | 1,435,479 | 1,640,452 |
| 1955 | 1,640,038 | 1,854,770 |
| 1956 | 1,649,934 | 1,877,952 |
| 1957 | 1,672,258 | 1,846,946 |
| 1958 | 1,748,437 | 2,051,970 |
| 1959 | 1,878,940 | 2,222,000 |
| 1960 | 1,906,000 | 2,221,000 |
| 1961 | 2,097,000 | 2,478,000 |
| 1962 | 2,003,000 | 2,449,000 |
| 1963 | 2,045,000 | 2,534,000 |
| 1964 | 2,156,000 | 2,717,000 |
| 1965 | 2,248,000 | 2,841,000 |
| 1966 | 2,435,000 E* | 2,940,000 E* |
| 1967 | 2,450,000 E* | 2,955,000 E* |
* Estimate
The budgetary story of the expansion in the White House Office can be seen in Table I. The first big jump in budget after 1939 occurred in 1947 when President. Truman insisted that all borrowing of personnel from the agencies and departments had to cease. The 1947 budget then was the first “honest” one for the White House Office. President Truman’s staff was not that much larger than Roosevelt’s. The Increase in budget since 1947 has been steady, although on several occasions it has been cut slightly from one year to the next. The trend has been steadily upward.
Although the professional staff in the White House Office has not increased. as rapidly as these budgeting figures might suggest, Roosevelt after 1939 operated with an average of eight professional staff members while Eisenhower began his Presidency in 1953 with twenty-one and Kennedy began his Presidency in 1961 with that same number.
It cannot be denied that the Reorganization Act of 1939 and Reorganization Plan No. 1 rank among the most important events in the development of the American Presidency. Moreover, few political scientists today would argue that the “institution” of the Presidency, the Executive Office of the President in general and the White House Office in particular, is not important. As Clinton Rossiter has put it, “We can never again talk about it the Presidency) sensibly without accounting for 'the men around the President.'”