The Press Secretary

There is a curious office in the White House that the Founders never imagined, the Constitution never authorized, and the American people never voted for. Yet it has become one of the most powerful positions in the executive branch: the White House press secretary. We tend to argue about who occupies that podium, whether they are honest or evasive, smooth or bumbling, liked or loathed by the press corps. That misses the point entirely. The real question is deeper and far more troubling for a free society. What does it mean when a single, unelected person is tasked with controlling the flow of information from the most powerful office on earth? That is a Hayekian knowledge problem in a necktie.

The Invention Nobody Asked For

The Founders understood something we have forgotten: a republic depends on an informed citizenry. Jefferson said he would rather have newspapers without government than government without newspapers. The First Amendment was designed to keep the channels of communication open, not just between citizens and citizens, but between citizens and their rulers. The Founders envisioned a president who could speak to the people directly through written messages to Congress, through public addresses, through the press of the day. They did not envision a filter, a spin doctor, or a single voice charged with interpreting the president's words for the nation. The Constitution's Article II, which vests executive power in the president, says nothing about a spokesperson. It does not need to. The president can act and speak for himself.

The press secretary is a twentieth-century invention, and like many twentieth-century inventions, it represents the creep of centralization into yet another domain of American life. It started informally under Woodrow Wilson, who held the first regular press conferences but relied on his private secretary to manage the flow. Franklin Roosevelt formalized the role, appointing Stephen Early as the first official press secretary and using the position to carefully shape public perception during the Depression and World War II. Since then, the role has metastasized into a mandatory daily ritual, a performance where one person decides what is said, what is not said, and how it will be framed. That is the very definition of central planning, but of information instead of grain.

The Knowledge Problem Applied to News

Friedrich Hayek taught us that no central planner can gather all the dispersed knowledge held by individuals in a free society. The price system works because it coordinates that knowledge without anyone having to master it all. The same principle applies to political information. The press secretary sits at a podium and tries to condense the infinite complexity of government action into a single, controlled narrative. They answer some questions, dodge others, and deliver talking points crafted by a team of communications strategists. Meanwhile, the executive branch produces thousands of documents, decisions, regulations, and internal debates every week. No single person, or even a team, can truthfully represent that complexity in a thirty-minute briefing.

The result is not information. It is a product. A branded message, carefully packaged and distributed to journalists who have become less reporters than delivery systems. Consider what happens when a press secretary says the president believes X on this issue. What does that mean? Perhaps the president genuinely believes X. Perhaps he believes Y but the communications team decided X polls better. Perhaps the issue is complicated and the president has not made up his mind, but the press secretary must say something. The process of distilling a sprawling, chaotic government into a single sentence inevitably distorts the truth. It is not malice, it is the nature of the job.

Thomas Sowell taught us to look at incentives, not intentions. The press secretary's primary incentive is to make the president look good. Secondary incentives include protecting the administration's agenda, deflecting criticism, and managing the news cycle. Truth-telling, if it conflicts with those incentives, will lose every time. This structural reality means that even the most honest individual in that role will eventually bend under the weight of the job requirements. You cannot centrally plan the truth any more than you can centrally plan a wheat harvest.

From Briefing to Performance

Watch a modern press briefing. It is theater. The press secretary walks to the podium, delivers a prepared opening statement, and then parries questions with practiced evasions. The journalists play their role too, grandstanding, demanding gotcha moments, trying to force an unforced error. Everyone is playing a game. Nobody is really informing the public. I have watched this unfold across multiple administrations. Under Clinton, Mike McCurry was a smooth operator who could make a policy defeat sound like a tactical victory. Under Bush, Ari Fleischer and Tony Snow each brought their own style but served the same function: managing the narrative, not reporting facts. Under Obama, Robert Gibbs and later Josh Earnest defended a massive expansion of government with practiced calm. Under Trump, Kayleigh McEnany and others faced a hostile press and adopted a combative posture. Under Biden, Karine Jean-Pierre has continued the tradition of evasive non-answers.

Notice what did not change: the basic structure. The podium. The script. The dance. The central planning of information. The result is a kind of information rent-seeking. The press secretary extracts value from the office by controlling the narrative. The journalists extract value by getting a clip that fits their editorial slant. And the public? They get nothing but noise, filtered, spun, and curated by people whose careers depend on managing perceptions rather than conveying reality. This is not a failure of any one administration. It is a feature of the office itself.

What the Constitution Actually Says

Let us return to first principles. The Constitution vests executive power in a single president. Article II is remarkably brief about how that power is exercised. But it does not create a Ministry of Information. It does not establish a position whose primary duty is to speak for the executive branch in a daily, controlled setting. The president can speak for himself. He can write. He can hold press conferences. He can release statements. All of that is consistent with accountability: the people can hear directly from their elected chief executive and judge him. The press secretary, however, interposes a layer. A barrier. A filter. It turns the relationship between the president and the people from direct to mediated. And mediation, in politics, means manipulation.

Some will argue that a modern presidency is too complex for direct communication. The president is too busy. The press corps needs an official source. There are too many reporters to handle individually. But that argument amounts to saying: we have centralized so much power in the executive branch that we now need a bureaucrat to manage how the public hears about it. The solution, then, is not to perfect the press secretary role. It is to reduce the scope of executive power so that the president can be held directly accountable.

James Madison warned in Federalist No. 51 that you must first enable the government to control the governed, and in the next place oblige it to control itself. The press secretary system does the opposite: it enables the government to control how the governed receive information, while insulating the president from direct accountability. That is a structural failure of constitutional design, but one we have accepted without thinking.

The Cure Is Not a Better Spokesman

Every time a press secretary draws criticism, the instinct is to demand a replacement. Get someone honest. Get someone tough. Get someone who will answer the question. This is like blaming the weatherman for the storm. The problem is not the individual, it is the office. As long as the press secretary exists, the incentive structure will produce the same result: controlled messaging, filtered information, and a public that is less informed than it should be.

The cure is to return power to the people by demanding direct accountability. The president should answer questions himself, not through a surrogate. Congress should question executive officials in hearings that actually probe, not perform. The press should stop treating the daily briefing as the primary source of news and start digging into the actual work of government. And we, the citizens, should stop watching the briefings as if they were news. They are not news. They are the central planner's daily report, a five-hundred-word summary of what the administration wants you to believe, delivered by someone whose job is to make you believe it.

The truth is out there, in agency reports, in congressional testimony, in documents obtained through FOIA, in the careful work of journalists who actually investigate rather than transcribe. That is the hard work of liberty. Nobody said it would be easy. The press secretary is not going away. But we can stop pretending the briefing is a genuine exchange of information. We can stop mistaking performance for transparency. And we can start holding the president directly accountable, not through his spokesman, but through our own attention, our own judgment, and our own refusal to accept centrally planned truth. That is the duty of a free people in a constitutional republic. It always has been.