How presidents get their facts

Here’s a basic truth about people who make decisions about public policy: they rarely have all the facts they want. Yet policy has to get made anyway.

No one is confronted more often with this conundrum than the President of the United States, though members of Congress can come close. The challenge is that purported facts are dynamic — they keep changing. Additional facts come to light. Others are found to be wrong. Some are clearly reliable, others more dubious. And regardless, they come at high-level policy makers quickly, relentlessly, from all directions, and from all kinds of sources.

So how do presidents and others sort through all this? They get a lot of information, of course, by consulting with experts. Every president forms his own cadre of men and women he relies on. Then, of course, there are the more formal — but no less professional — sources of information, such as the Joint Chiefs, members of the Cabinet, and the President’s Daily Brief.

Presidents have a lot of memos prepared for them, though not all read them. To be sure, they need the information to be condensed. They don’t have the time, patience, or inclination to delve deeply into a topic. And they pay attention to the news and especially to media pundits, who articulate the facts and present them from their own slant, because many of these men and women have vast audiences and it’s important to know what they’re telling their viewers.

Presidents and members of Congress also rely often on academics and think tanks: places like the Brookings Institution, the Rand Corporation, the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation — though which they listen to depends on their ideology. Faith leaders are also an important source of information and advice. Like well-known pundits, many of them have vast influence among Americans on questions of values.

This whole process, of course, is important — you don’t want a president to make decisions based on false information. It goes on constantly behind the scenes, often for weeks before we ordinary citizens hear the first presidential peep on a given subject. But it’s also getting more difficult, as sources of reliable and unreliable information multiply. That’s why, in the end, it is so vital for a president to be able to rely on advisers and professionals who can help the president sort out what’s true and what’s not.

Lee Hamilton is a Senior Advisor for the Indiana University Center on Representative Government; a Distinguished Scholar at the IU Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies; and a Professor of Practice at the IU O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. He was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years.