White House Office of the Executive Clerk

White House Office of the Executive Clerk
Agency overview
Formed	1865; 159 years ago
Headquarters	Eisenhower Executive Office Building; Washington, D.C., U.S.; 38°53′51.24″N 77°2′20.93″W / 38.8975667°N 77.0391472°W
Agency executive	David E. Kalbaugh, Executive Clerk;
Parent department	Office of the Staff Secretary

The White House Office of the Executive Clerk is responsible for managing the original legal documents signed by the President of the United States which make up his official acts—these include public laws, vetoes, treaties, executive orders, signing statements, nominations, proclamations, commissions, pardons, and certificates of awards or medals.^[1]^[2] The office is further responsible for delivering any reports or messages the President wishes to send to the United States Congress.^[2] Formed in 1865, it is one of the oldest offices in the Executive Office of the President of the United States.

Organization

The Office of the Executive Clerk is currently housed within the larger White House Office of the Staff Secretary, which controls the general paper flow through the President's office.^[1] The Office of the Executive Clerk is a small component, typically composed of just the Executive Clerk and three to five assistants working out of Room 2 in the northwest corner of the ground floor of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building—across from the West Wing.^[3]^[4]

Unlike most components of the White House Office—where the staff are nearly all political appointees of the incumbent President—the Office of the Executive Clerk is staffed entirely by career civil servants.^[5] Also unique within the White House, the Executive Clerk retains many of its records from one administration to the next, rather than packing up all documents and data and delivering them to the National Archives and Records Administration as other White House offices are required to do under the Presidential Records Act.^[2]^[5] Since the founding of the office in 1865, there have been only 11 executive clerks—an average term of over 13 years per executive clerk. The current White House Executive Clerk, since 2012, is career civil servant Dave Kalbaugh.^[4] Kalbaugh has served in the Office of the Executive Clerk for 29 years, serving four presidents.^[6]^[7]

History

Before the establishment of the White House Staff Secretary in 1953, the Executive Clerk oversaw a much broader range of White House functions, including White House finances, the messenger service, the mail room, presidential correspondence, and records management.^[8]

Executive clerks

Partial table of former White House executive clerks:

Officeholder	Term start	Term end
William H. Crook	1870	1910
Rudolph Forster	1910	1943
Maurice C. Latta	1943	1948
William J. Hopkins^[8]	1948	1971
Noble C. Melencamp^[9]	1971	1973
Robert D. Linder^[10]	1973	1982
Ronald G. Geisler^[11]	1982	1994
G. Timothy Saunders	1994	2012
David E. Kalbaugh	2012	present