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The White House receives tens of thousands of letters, emails, and phone calls every day. Behind the scenes, one of the government’s largest and oldest departments works to process this flood of communication from American citizens.
Staff members at the Office of Presidential Correspondence analyze public sentiment and ensure the President hears directly from citizens across the country.
From One Clerk to Hundreds of Staff Members
The office started small in 1897 under President William McKinley. A single clerk named Ira R.T. Smith handled about 100 letters per day for a White House staff of just twelve people.
The job grew along with the federal government. By Herbert Hoover’s presidency, daily mail volume had reached 800 letters as the country faced the Great Depression.
Then came Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. Desperate citizens wrote to the President asking for help during the economic crisis. Daily mail volume exploded to 8,000 letters.
The existing system couldn’t handle the flood. Staff expanded rapidly, and Smith became the first “chief of mails” – a position that evolved into today’s Director of Correspondence.
This growth reflected more than administrative needs. The volume of mail became a real-time measure of how much Americans expected their President to help solve their problems.
The Age of Diplomats
During the Cold War, the correspondence office underwent professionalization. From the Eisenhower through Nixon administrations, the department was typically led by officers from the U.S. Foreign Service.
Diplomats were chosen for their writing skills and understanding of statecraft. The last Foreign Service officer to hold the position was Michael B. Smith, who served from 1971 to 1973.
After that, the role became a political appointment. This shift reflected changing views about the office’s purpose – less diplomatic craftsmanship, more domestic political messaging.
Modern Structure Takes Shape
The Carter administration briefly moved the correspondence office into the newly created Office of Administration alongside other logistical functions.
The Reagan administration made a more significant change. It split the substantive work of reading and responding to mail from basic logistics like sorting and delivery.
Mail logistics remained with the Office of Administration. The Office of Presidential Correspondence was placed under the White House Staff Secretary, who manages all paperwork flowing to and from the Oval Office.
This placement was crucial. It established the correspondence office not as a back-room mailroom, but as part of the President’s core executive team.
How Your Letter Travels to the President
When you mail a letter to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, it begins a complex journey that balances democratic ideals with modern security requirements.
Security Screening Comes First
Your letter doesn’t go directly to the White House. All physical mail gets routed to a secure, off-site facility where the Secret Service and other personnel screen every piece for potential threats.
This creates significant delays. The White House warns that physical mail delivery is “often significantly delayed” and items “may be damaged during the security screening process.”
Citizens are advised against sending anything valuable or sentimental, like family photos, or perishable items like food or flowers. These items cannot be returned and may be destroyed.
This security apparatus creates tension between democratic accessibility and protection. Many people now choose email not just for speed, but to avoid a system that can be slow and destructive to physical items.
The Great Sorting Operation
Once cleared by security, letters travel to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the West Wing. Here, a large team of professional staff, dozens of interns, and hundreds of volunteers begins processing America’s mail.
The first step involves reading every letter to understand its purpose and sentiment. Paper letters stay clipped to their original envelopes to preserve context like postmarks and return addresses.
Staff sort correspondence into broad categories: by topic (economy, healthcare, foreign policy), by sentiment (praise, criticism, requests for help), or by type (policy opinions, greeting requests, complex casework).
Analysis and Trend Spotting
The office doesn’t just sort mail – it analyzes it. Staff identify trends, noting which issues generate the most passion and what new concerns emerge across the country.
This analysis gets turned into data. The office produces reports and graphs showing mail volume on specific topics, providing real-time snapshots of public opinion for White House policymakers.
For letters detailing specific problems with federal agencies – veterans struggling with the VA, seniors dealing with Social Security issues, families navigating immigration bureaucracy – the Agency Liaison team takes direct action. These caseworkers forward correspondence to the appropriate agency and ensure citizens get responses or assistance.
The President’s Daily Sample
The President can’t read every letter, but the office ensures he receives an unfiltered sample of what Americans are telling him.
President Barack Obama’s “10 Letters a Day” tradition became the best-known example of this practice. Obama instituted it to stay connected to everyday Americans’ lives.
The Director of Correspondence and senior staff carefully select this daily sample. Letters are chosen to represent the overall mail’s diversity – different opinions, geographic locations, and demographics.
Selection often focuses on timeliness, connecting to current news or policy debates. Above all, letters are chosen for powerful personal narratives that humanize complex issues.
The team might select letters from cities or states the President plans to visit, providing local context before he arrives.
These letters go into the President’s nightly briefing book. Unlike most Oval Office documents, they typically aren’t filtered through policy advisors or fact-checkers. They provide a raw, direct link between the highest office and the citizens it serves.
Preserving History
Your letter’s journey doesn’t end after processing. Under the Presidential Records Act of 1978, all correspondence created or received by the President or staff becomes a presidential record.
After processing, most public correspondence gets carefully preserved. When a presidential administration ends, legal custody transfers automatically to the National Archives and Records Administration.
While NARA can dispose of certain high-volume, low-value mail after sampling, the core correspondence is kept permanently. These letters eventually end up in Presidential Libraries, where historians and the public can access them through Freedom of Information Act requests.
The People Behind the Process
The Office of Presidential Correspondence employs one of the largest teams in the Executive Office of the President. During George W. Bush’s administration, nearly eighty full-time employees and interns worked in the office.
Professional Staff Structure
The office operates under the White House Staff Secretary, with 40-50 employees plus a large volunteer corps. According to the Biden administration’s 2023 Annual Report to Congress on White House Office Personnel, key positions include:
- Special Assistant to the President and Director of Presidential Correspondence ($115,500)
- Managing Directors ($105,000)
- Director of Presidential Correspondence Management ($89,069)
- Director of Special Projects ($96,927)
- Director of Volunteers, Comment Line, and Greetings ($84,126)
The Volunteer Army
The massive volume of daily correspondence – often tens of thousands of items – would be impossible to manage with paid staff alone. The office relies heavily on interns and volunteers.
During the Clinton administration, the Office of Presidential Student Correspondence used more than 100 volunteers to help fulfill the President’s promise to respond to every child who wrote to him. This team processed an average of 2,000 letters from children every workday.
Volunteer programs are highly structured. During the Obama administration, the office offered distinct opportunities: working the Comment Line, serving as agency liaison, or analyzing mail on specific policy areas.
The program had commitment levels ranging from “Correspondence Volunteer” (one four-hour shift weekly) to “Volunteer Leadership Program” (minimum 30 hours weekly with mentorship from White House staff).
Volunteers typically must be U.S. citizens over 18 with an interest in public service and computer skills. Many full-time staffers begin their careers as volunteers.
This creates a symbiotic relationship. The White House gets motivated, educated labor to carry out a core democratic function that would be prohibitively expensive to staff fully. Volunteers gain experience, insight into executive branch operations, and credentials for future public service careers.
Daily Life in the Correspondence Office
Working in the correspondence office involves immersing yourself in unfiltered American public opinion. One intern described reading hundreds of daily letters as getting “a glimpse of all the humanity of the world.”
A former director noted the office deals “a lot in emotion and empathy” as staff absorb what people hope and fear.
Typical daily responsibilities include reading and summarizing letters, taking notes on Comment Line voicemails, importing information into tracking systems, helping draft responses, and preparing materials for presidential events.
The work requires speed, efficiency, careful judgment, and empathy – especially when crafting responses on behalf of the President.
Many staff find the experience profoundly humbling. It provides a powerful reminder that behind abstract policy debates are real people with complex lives. The daily mail flow amplifies “voices who aren’t always heard” and brings humanity back to political processes that can feel distant.
Technology Transforms Presidential Mail
The correspondence office’s history mirrors America’s technological evolution. Each new communication tool has reshaped how citizens contact their president and how the White House listens.
The Digital Revolution Begins
For most of its history, presidential correspondence meant paper and ink. In 1993, President Bill Clinton became the first president with a public email address. The same year, the White House launched its first website.
This opened an instantaneous communication channel with immediate, exponential impact. The George W. Bush administration was first to handle widespread public email use.
Volume increased so dramatically that the White House officially stated it could not respond to every message due to the “large volume of e-mail received” – acknowledging that communication scale had outstripped response capacity.
Obama’s Digital Overhaul
The Obama administration inherited this digital flood and sought strategic management. In its first year, the White House received approximately 65,000 paper letters and 100,000 emails weekly.
To handle this flow, the administration implemented a sophisticated “Citizen Relationship Management” system – a major technological and philosophical shift.
The CRM integrated all White House contact methods – physical letters, emails, web forms, and online petitions – into a single platform. This allowed more efficient tracking, routing, and analysis of public feedback.
The system moved from ad-hoc processing to strategic, data-driven public engagement.
Social Media Creates New Challenges
As the White House adapted to email, social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram became central to political communication.
The White House established the Office of Digital Strategy to manage the President’s official social media presence, using platforms to amplify messages and engage directly with citizens online.
This raised critical legal questions: Are public comments, replies, and direct messages to official White House social media accounts correspondence? Are they subject to the Presidential Records Act?
The Obama administration, working with the National Archives, determined they are. By law, this new communication form must be preserved for history.
This legal requirement created massive technical challenges. The White House developed automated systems to archive content on official pages. However, the process is imperfect.
When social media presence gets archived at an administration’s end, it may not retain full functionality. The ability to view or add comments to old posts may be lost, freezing dialogue in time.
There appears to be structural separation between the Office of Digital Strategy, which manages public-facing social media engagement, and the correspondence office, which processes one-to-one communication. This creates two parallel but not fully integrated digital communication streams.
The Access Paradox
Digital and social media have created a profound access paradox. Technology makes it virtually frictionless to message the President. A tweet or web form takes seconds, dramatically lowering communication barriers that existed with paper and stamps.
This ease of access has led to exponential growth in message volume. To cope, the White House has been forced to rely on automation, data analysis, and sophisticated filtering systems.
The correspondence office’s mission now explicitly includes coordinating “automated responses” for most inquiries. While more people can “speak” to the White House than ever, sheer volume dictates that systems must prioritize efficiency and trend analysis over individual, personalized engagement.
The chance of any single email receiving a custom, human-drafted reply is now vanishingly small. Technology has opened the front door wider than ever while making the receiving room infinitely larger and more crowded.
Communication has fundamentally changed from potential dialogue to contribution to a massive public opinion dataset.
When Citizen Letters Change History
Despite massive mail volume and automated systems, writing to the President is far from futile. Throughout history, individual letters from ordinary citizens have had tangible, sometimes profound impacts on presidents, policies, and national conversations.
Obama’s Daily Letters Program
President Barack Obama’s decision to read ten public letters nightly was the most prominent modern example of direct presidential engagement with constituent mail.
He described the practice as crucial to “resist the bubble” of Washington and stay grounded in American realities. This wasn’t passive – it often led to direct action.
Natoma Canfield’s December 2009 letter exemplified this impact. An Ohio resident and self-employed cancer survivor, Canfield detailed her struggle to find affordable health insurance.
Her powerful personal story arrived during contentious healthcare reform debates. The letter moved President Obama so much that it became central to his administration’s push for the Affordable Care Act.
He spoke of her story in speeches, carried her letter in his pocket as a reminder of stakes, and used her experience to humanize complex, polarizing policy debates. The letter was later framed and hung outside the Oval Office as permanent testament to a single citizen’s influence.
This wasn’t isolated. President Obama frequently forwarded compelling letters to cabinet secretaries or senior policy staff with handwritten margin notes asking “How can we fix this?” or challenging existing policies based on citizens’ real-world experiences.
A letter from Rebekah Erler, a Minnesota mother detailing her family’s financial struggles, was so affecting that she was invited as a State of the Union guest, where the President shared her story with the nation.
These examples show direct chains from citizen letters to high-level policy review and presidential action.
Historical Letter Power
Citizen correspondence influence isn’t new. Throughout American history, individuals have used mail to advise, praise, and challenge presidents.
In 1958, baseball legend Jackie Robinson grew frustrated with President Dwight Eisenhower’s cautious civil rights approach. After Eisenhower delivered a speech calling for “patience” in equality struggles, Robinson wrote a powerful, respectful but firm rebuke.
“I respectfully remind you sir, that we have been the most patient of all people,” Robinson wrote. “17 million Negroes cannot do as you suggest and wait for the hearts of men to change.”
The letter directly challenged the President on the era’s defining moral issue – a clear example of using correspondence to hold power accountable.
An even more remarkable historical example involves Julia I. Sand’s correspondence with President Chester A. Arthur. When President James Garfield was assassinated in 1881, successor Arthur was widely viewed with suspicion due to his reputation as a product of New York’s corrupt political machine.
Sand, a private citizen and invalid, took it upon herself to be the President’s conscience. She wrote 23 extraordinary letters to Arthur, urging him to cast aside old associations and rise to the presidency’s historic occasion.
Her unsolicited advice testified to the belief that any citizen can and should speak directly to their leader.
Political and Psychological Value
Beyond influencing specific policies, reading citizen mail serves crucial political and psychological functions for presidents.
Letters provide rich sources of powerful, humanizing stories that can be woven into speeches and public remarks to connect emotionally with Americans. Abstract policies about healthcare or the economy become much more compelling when told through single families’ struggles or successes.
The correspondence office functions as a national story-gathering apparatus for the President. By filtering tens of thousands of messages to find the most compelling personal narratives, the office provides constant streams of authentic, emotionally resonant material.
A single powerful letter can become a central pillar of major communications strategies, allowing presidents to build public support, explain policy, and demonstrate empathy.
Reading these letters serves as a vital psychological anchor for whoever occupies the Oval Office. The presidency is incredibly isolating, and the “White House bubble” can easily detach leaders from the lived experiences of people they serve.
As President Obama noted, engaging with letters helped him avoid becoming “cynical” or “calloused” by office pressures. It’s an exercise in maintaining perspective and empathy – a direct line to reality outside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue’s gates.
From a political intelligence perspective, mail serves as valuable, if unscientific, public opinion barometer. Experienced legislative staffers often operate on the principle that a single thoughtful letter represents concerns of at least ten other constituents who felt the same way but didn’t take time to write.
This gives each piece of correspondence significant weight in gauging public sentiment.
Presidential Letters to Each Other
While the correspondence office manages massive public communication flows, a quieter, more personal letter-writing tradition takes place at government’s highest level.
Private notes passed between outgoing presidents and their successors represent a powerful modern ritual that speaks to American democratic ideals’ core.
Passing the Torch
This tradition began in modern form in 1989, when Ronald Reagan left a handwritten note for successor George H.W. Bush on the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. Every outgoing president has continued the practice since.
These letters profoundly symbolize peaceful power transfers – a cornerstone of American democracy. Often written in presidency’s final hours, these notes transcend campaign bitterness to offer moments of shared humanity and responsibility.
They recognize that the office is bigger than any individual and that presidency burdens are unique, shared only by the small club of people who have held the job.
Letter content varies with presidential personality:
Ronald Reagan to George H.W. Bush (1989): On whimsical stationery featuring a cartoon elephant surrounded by turkeys, Reagan offered humorous advice: “Don’t let the turkeys get you down.”
George H.W. Bush to Bill Clinton (1993): In remarkable grace after a tough election loss, Bush wrote, “Your success now is our country’s success. I am rooting hard for you.”
Barack Obama to Donald Trump (2017): Obama’s letter was described as a formal reminder of the president’s role as guardian of democratic institutions and norms, urging his successor to leave those democracy instruments “at least as strong as we found them.”
Donald Trump to Joe Biden (2021): Despite contentious transition and his decision not to attend the inauguration, Trump continued the tradition. Biden described the letter as “very generous,” but unlike past practice where letters were eventually made public, he has kept its contents private.
In an era of intense political polarization, this quiet tradition has gained heightened public significance.
The act of an outgoing president leaving personal, often encouraging notes for replacements serves as powerful, tangible affirmation that despite deep political divisions, individuals recognize the presidency institution as more important than any single occupant.
It’s a private camaraderie gesture reinforcing American democratic norms’ stability and continuity, acting as quiet counter-narrative to public division.
How to Make Your Voice Heard
Engaging with the President and White House is every American citizen’s fundamental right. Knowing the most effective communication methods can help ensure your message gets received and processed efficiently.
Communication Channels
The White House offers several correspondence channels, each with distinct advantages.
Physical Mail: This traditional method suits formal, thoughtful, detailed correspondence. However, all physical mail undergoes rigorous, time-consuming off-site security screening that causes significant delays.
Online Contact Form: This is the fastest, most highly recommended White House contact method. Submitting messages through the official web form ensures instant delivery and direct entry into the digital correspondence management system for sorting and analysis.
White House Comment Line: This provides a direct phone line for citizens wishing to voice opinions verbally. During business hours, volunteers often staff the line to transcribe comments. Otherwise, you can leave recorded messages. It’s ideal for clear, concise opinions on specific issues.
White House Switchboard: This general White House number should be used for general inquiries or reaching specific offices or departments. It’s not intended for general policy comments.
Tips for Effective Messages
With tens of thousands of daily messages, crafting clear, compelling communication can increase impact.
Be Clear and Concise: Limit letters or emails to single issues and keep them to one page or few focused paragraphs. Clear, direct messages are easier for staff to process and categorize.
Identify Yourself: Begin by stating you’re a constituent and mention your city and state. Personalize messages by explaining your background (“As a teacher,” “As a veteran,” “As a parent of a child with a disability”) to add context and credibility.
Combine Facts with Personal Stories: The most effective letters weave together factual arguments with personal narratives. Explain how particular policies or issues affect you, your family, or your community. These human stories often catch correspondence office readers’ attention and can be incredibly persuasive.
Be Specific and Have Clear “Asks”: If writing about specific legislation, identify it by bill number (H.R. 123 or S. 456) if possible. Clearly state the action you want the President to take. For example, “I am writing to urge you to sign this bill,” or “I am asking you to direct the Environmental Protection Agency to…”
Maintain Courteous Tone: Respectful, positive tones are generally more effective than angry or demanding ones. Policymakers and staff, like anyone, are more receptive to courteous communication, even when critical of policies.
| Method | Contact Detail | Key Considerations |
|---|---|---|
| Physical Mail | The White House<br>1600 Pennsylvania Avenue N.W.<br>Washington, DC 20500 | Best for formal, traditional correspondence. Be aware of significant security screening delays. Do not send valuable or perishable items. |
| Online Contact Form | https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/ | Fastest and most recommended method. Ensures your message is entered directly into the digital correspondence system for processing. |
| Comment Line | (202) 456-1111 | For leaving spoken comments. Staffed by volunteers during business hours; otherwise, you can leave recorded messages. Ideal for concise, verbal feedback. |
| TTY/TDD Comment Line | (202) 456-6213 | Accessible line for individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing. |
| Switchboard | (202) 456-1414 | General White House number. Use if trying to reach specific offices without direct lines. Not for general policy comments. |
The Office of Presidential Correspondence represents democracy in action – a direct link between American citizens and their highest elected official. Whether through handwritten letters, emails, or phone calls, your voice contributes to the ongoing conversation between the American people and their President.
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