The President of the United States, President Obama, and President Trump have been very supportive of the cabinet. They have been very supportive of the cabinet. The President of the United States, President Obama, and President Trump have been very supportive of the cabinet.
a good job that they don't meet with me much because they're like the good students in class. They are just handling their business really well. Well, hello everybody. It is good to see you guys.
We try to do a cabinet meeting every two months. The meetings run about an hour and a half. What we'll do is talk to a lot of different folks within the White House, the policy folks, the chief of staff's office, the communications office, and find out what are the important initiatives that we want to talk to the cabinet about, and also talk to the cabinet as well about the issues that they think are important to discuss with the president.
So there's a series of internal meetings to discuss that and we hammer out an agenda after that. Iraq, Afghanistan, the Asia trip, jobs. I think there should probably be robust discussion of job creation.
This is a huge kind of six, seven weeks that's coming up and a lot of the budget and obviously the board decision and a bunch of other things that are coming down the pike. Each president has the discretion to decide who's in this cabinet. There are the heads heads of the 15 executive departments who are always in the cabinet. These are the people who are in the line of succession after the president and vice president.
And then there are a number of folks who have cabinet rank. In our administration, that would be the head of OMB, EPA, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, the U.S. Trade Representative, and the Ambassador to the United Nations. We haven't had coffee service in the past. Maybe because it's an afternoon meeting, they want to give them a little caffeine.
I'm not sure. Post-its or something to label our... Oh, wait, I'm trying to figure out... ...post-its.
Oh, dang, dang, dang. Hey, there are the post-its. I've worked for the President since he was in the U.S.
Senate, so I'm very used to sitting behind him at meetings. But to now sit in a Cabinet meeting in the historic Cabinet Room, you're just surrounded by the history of this institution. It's humbling. Cabinet offices were created as soon as the Constitution was ratified.
The government was established in 1789 under the Constitution. The first cabinet meeting, I understand, from 1793, the President had his four cabinet members there. We now have 25 people around the table. Each of the cabinet members sit in a certain seat depending on when their apartment was created. It's still tradition that a cabinet officer have the opportunity of taking the chair away himself or herself to buy the chair from the government.
It's one of those great souvenirs of being a cabinet officer. The cabinet meeting is one of the few times that I'm aware of where the Secret Service allows the entire cabinet to be in one place at one time. As you know, during State of the Union addresses, we typically ask one member of the cabinet to sit out.
These are closed sessions and the President really welcomes frank, unvarnished advice from his advisors. I want to, number one, make sure that they know that they have my ear. The second thing is to reinforce a real strong sense of camaraderie that the Cabinet members have built among themselves. That was going on! When I hug him, it means a lot.
There's still something to the human interaction that you only get from in-person meetings. I don't think there's any substitute for the entire cabinet coming together. These cabinet meetings are an incredible way for everybody to communicate, for everyone to really understand each other.
understand what the issues are, and to help us all get on the same page so that we can advance the President's priorities. Today we're going to be focusing a lot on jobs, because obviously with the economy in such a hole, one of the things that we want to make sure of is that we leave no stone unturned when it comes to helping people get jobs. What we've typically done is bring the press in at the end of the meeting. The cabinet meeting is an important symbol of government at work. The primary focus of our discussion today, though, had to do with the had to do with the same thing that Americans sitting across kitchen tables all across the country are focused on, and that is jobs and the economy.
You would think that in a world like the one we're living in, where you can communicate with anybody in the world at literally a flick of a mouse or some other picking up a cell phone, that you wouldn't need a lot of face-to-face meetings. But in fact, I think that it's not only as important as it always was in the era before instantaneous communication. But to some extent even more so. So that people can look each other in the eye, they can watch the body language, and they can work together to get to the resolution of whatever the issue is. So these cabinet meetings give everybody a chance to do that.
This is one of the biggest problems, that people walk out of here without their BlackBerrys. So now I have to actually go find out who all these BlackBerrys belong to. So, alright, so Chew has walked out without, Carol's walked out. You're going to be good.
You know what I