Overview

The National Economic Council (NEC) and the Domestic Policy Council (DPC) are White House policy councils responsible for advising the president and facilitating policy dialogue between agency heads and senior executive officials. NEC coordinates and advises on economic issues, ensures alignment with the president’s goals, and monitors policy implementation, while DPC performs analogous functions for domestic policy.

Both NEC and DPC have supported major AI and biosecurity policy initiatives, including coordinating CHIPS and Science Act implementation, developing and implementing actions in Presient Biden’s 2023 Executive Order on AI, coordinating agency reports to implement the 2022 Executive Order on Advancing the American Bioeconomy, and supporting parts of the National Biodefense Strategy. 

Background on NEC and DPC

• Government context: NEC and DPC are policy councils in the White House within the Executive Office of the President (EOP).
• Mission: to coordinate the economic and domestic policymaking processes (including policy development, implementation, and messaging) and provide economic and domestic policy advice to the president.
• Main activities: within their respective policy domains, NEC and DPC advise the president, convene council members to coordinate and deliberate on policies, monitor policy implementation, and ensure policy is consistent with the president’s agenda.
• Budget: NEC and DPC don’t have a publicly separate budget because their staff and resources are allocated through “slots” managed centrally by the White House. These slots are capped and allocated across components like the NEC and DPC, limiting staffing based on competing priorities rather than standalone budgets. 
• Staff: ~30-35 full-time staff at NEC, ~60-70 full-time staff at DPC (as of late 2024)
• Brief history: in 1970, President Nixon created the White House Office of Policy Development to oversee economic and domestic policy; in 1993, President Clinton split the office, forming the current NEC and DPC.

Organizational structure

NEC and DPC each have two components: 

1. the council itself (i.e. 10-20 Cabinet secretaries and senior officials), and 
2. the council staff (i.e. 30-70 full-time staff, mostly political appointees). 

When this guide refers to NEC and DPC, it typically refers to the NEC and DPC staff, not the council members.

Council members

The council members are the principals level of NEC and DPC. Most policy issues are resolved at the lower staff or deputy level, but issues with big strategic implications or unresolved disagreements rise to the principals level for deliberation among the council members. Both councils share key executive members, including the:

1. President
2. Vice President
3. NEC director
4. DPC director
5. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director
6. Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) chair
7. Secretaries of major cabinet departments like Treasury, Commerce, and Labor

In addition, NEC and DPC each have members focused on the councils’ respective policy issues (i.e. economic and international issues for NEC, domestic policy issues for DPC). For example, NEC includes the science and technology adviser, national security adviser, and the US Trade Representative (USTR); DPC includes the Attorney General, Secretary of HHS, and the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) director. 

Council staff

On the staff side, each council is led by their respective director, who is presidentially appointed and not Senate-confirmed. The directors are formally “Assistants to the President” and are often called the national economic adviser and the domestic policy adviser. Beneath the director are deputy assistants to the president, special assistants to the president (SAPs), and other staff. NEC typically has several deputies covering aspects of the domestic economy¹ and sometimes an international deputy who can be dual-hatted as a deputy national security advisor at the National Security Council (NSC) to foster cooperation between NEC and NSC. DPC usually has multiple deputy directors overseeing various domestic policy areas such as health care, education, and criminal justice. Each deputy typically oversees a small team of SAPs, and each SAP typically has 1-2 junior staffers supporting them.

NEC’s core staff usually consists of 30-35 positions that are mostly political appointees, with specific roles reflecting current economic focus areas such as macroeconomic and tax policy, energy policy, innovation, or manufacturing. DPC typically maintains a larger staff size of mostly detailees, with roles focused on key domestic policy priorities like education, immigration, health care, or social policy. Staff position titles in both councils often signal presidential priorities, with certain policy areas being added and removed between administrations. Given the small staff sizes and frequent structural changes between administrations, few org charts are available for NEC or DPC.

Activities

While many EOP offices serve advisory policy roles, EOP has four formal policy councils—NEC, DPC, the National Security Council (NSC), and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Every significant policy issue “belongs” to a White House policy council. NEC and DPC can be considered powerful, in-house think tanks that generate, vet, promote, implement, and sometimes coordinate messaging strategy around policy ideas. As two former DPC senior advisors described it, 

If you want to include a proposal in the President’s State of the Union address, you will need the sign-off of one of the policy councils. If you want to appeal a budget decision by OMB, you will need a policy council on your side. If you are caught in a policy dispute with another agency, you will need the assistance of a policy council to arbitrate the disagreement.

For the issues in their domain, NEC and DPC take on many roles to help advise the president, develop policy, advocate for policy, and coordinate policy implementation:

• Convening the council: chairs and moderates meetings of the council members to coordinate policy. The councils run dozens of meetings and conference calls each year to deliberate, advise the president, and reach decisions; they collate information and advice from within and outside the executive branch needed for presidential decisions; and they control the memos and slides the president sees on their respective policy issues.
• Developing and articulating the administration’s policy positions: the councils act as the official source to answer the question “What is the president’s policy on X?”; this often involves identifying issues and collaborating with agencies to develop and source policy solutions.
• Monitoring policy implementation by agencies: the councils coordinate across the executive branch to ensure different departments and agencies implement policy cohesively, solving coordination problems that arise, especially those crossing jurisdictional lines.
• Collaborating with other policy councils: NEC and DPC work alongside counterpart council directors where issues overlap, including the NSC and OSTP, which also convene Cabinet-level councils. Each council “owns” certain policy areas but must coordinate on cross-cutting issues.
• Advocating for the president’s policies: the councils help explain and promote policies to Congress, senior executive branch officials, the public, and the press when needed.

The “honest brokers”

While NEC and DPC work on policy formulation, advocacy, and implementation, many former directors agree that the councils’ chief role is that of an “honest broker,” serving as a deliberative body where major agencies and senior administration officials can coordinate their policy approaches.

For most issues, deliberations occur at the staff or deputies level, with principals-level meetings reserved for major strategic questions or unresolved disagreements. While staff focus on these day-to-day coordination efforts, directors may elevate particularly challenging or significant issues to the principals level. Former NEC Director Keith Hennessey gave the following illustrative example outlining who would weigh in at an NEC meeting for a hypothetical policy question:

Simple example: “Should the President support a $1 gas tax increase?“

This is not just an economic issue. There are effects on energy policy, on environmental policy, on transportation policy, and on the budget. There are legal issues, tax policy and administration issues, and effects on State and local governments. There are political constraints, vote-counting limitations, and interest group pressures and counterpressures. There are communications and electoral effects. For this supposedly simple yes/no question, let’s look at everyone within the Executive Branch who has a legitimate claim to providing advice to the President.

• NEC would host the meetings.
• CEA would attend and explain the economics of a gas tax increase – what would happen to fuel consumption, how would supply and demand shift, what would be the effect on driving and on oil imports. CEA would often tap into other expert economists inside and outside government for this information and analysis.
• Treasury would attend because it’s a tax issue. They would be the lead in expressing views on the tax policy, design, and administration issues, as well as on the broader economic effects.
• OMB would attend and be happy that the deficit would be lower. In a [Republican] Administration, OMB would sometimes oppose this policy because of the tax increase. But then somebody (probably Transportation or EPA) would argue we should spend the money and OMB would push back hard. OMB would also explain how gas taxes interact with the Highway Trust Fund.
• Commerce would attend because of the broad economic impact across a range of industries.
• Transportation would attend because it involves, duh, transportation.
• EPA would attend and be excited that emissions would be lower. They would also snipe with Transportation over who had jurisdiction.
• Energy would attend because it’s an energy issue, even though the Department of Energy really doesn’t do fuel taxes or vehicles.
• Interior might want in because they do oil and gas production.
• Agriculture would want to be included because of the significant effects on farmers, both for their farm equipment and the cost of shipping their goods.
• Since this is principally a domestic economic issue, you probably don’t need State or USTR there.

NEC, DPC, and emerging technology policy

A core function of both NEC and DPC is to coordinate policy across the executive branch. Historically, NEC has generally played a larger role in overseeing recent AI policy, particularly related to consumer protection and industrial policy, while DPC has typically overseen more in biosecurity policy (though this distribution could shift over time). Given the breadth of NEC and DPC’s focus, jurisdictional challenges often arise over policy areas that don’t clearly fall into the broad categories of “economic” or “domestic” policy.

Recent AI-related developments at NEC and DPC

• October 2024: The National Security Memorandum on AI tasks NEC with assessing “the relative competitive advantage of the United States private sector AI ecosystem, the key sources of the United States private sector’s competitive advantage, and possible risks to that position.” 
• September 2024: NEC is tasked with co-leading a new task force on AI datacenter infrastructure to coordinate policy across government. 
• October 2023: President Biden’s Executive Order on AI tasks the NEC and DPC directors with helping identify priority areas for increased federal government AI talent, including accelerated hiring pathways and assessing which types of talent are highest priority for addressing AI risks (but in practice, OSTP has led on AI talent). The order also established the NEC and DPC directors as members of the new White House AI Council, and NEC in particular has worked closely with various agencies on developing and implementing their Executive Order actions.
• 2022: NEC helps coordinate the implementation of the CHIPS and Science Act, which allocated $52 billion to expand domestic semiconductor research and manufacturing and authorized significant increases to the budgets of federal science agencies.

Recent bio-related developments at DPC

• October 2022: the National Biodefense Strategy tasks DPC with supporting federal messaging and information coordination to the public for biothreats and bio incidents.
• September 2022: President Biden’s Executive Order on Advancing the American Bioeconomy tasks the DPC director with coordinating agency reports on biotechnology and biomanufacturing use in areas including health, energy, food innovation, and supply chains.

Working at NEC and DPC

The top three layers of seniority in NEC and DPC are all presidential appointees: Assistant to the President (AP), which is the official title of the NEC and DPC Directors; Deputy Assistant to the President (DAP), and Special Assistant to the President (SAP). Roles below those levels of seniority include Director (a distinct term from “NEC Director” or “DPC Director, which refers to the heads of each office), Senior Policy Advisor, Policy Advisor, and Policy Assistant. Sometimes other positions somewhat removed from this seniority structure, such as Senior Advisors or Special Advisors, are also created for bespoke functions.

Nearly all NEC staff are political appointees hired directly by the White House. DPC, by contrast, hires mostly detailees from agencies. Both offices often have several staff members hired either by fellowships or on IPAs from outside government. The White House allocates a finite number of slots to NEC, DPC, and numerous other offices via a central clearinghouse mechanism. As a result, the exact headcounts of NEC and DPC can change over time, but at any given point in time, they often face strict caps. NEC and DPC sometimes have more flexibility to open up new slots for fellows (which are distinct from IPAs) than other slots, but these flexibilities vary over time as well. In general, APs, DAPs, and SAPs must be direct hires by the White House, rather than detailees or other categories of hires.

NEC and DPC offer summer and semester internships for undergraduates, graduate students, and recent graduates on the White House campus in DC. Interns can work with council staff on wide-ranging issues, including (for NEC) infrastructure, supply chains, competition, research and development, small business, financial regulation, housing, competition, and fiscal policy, as well as (for DPC) issues such as health care, education, immigration, and criminal justice.

Fellowships that have made placements in NEC or DPC include: 

• White House Fellows – a 1-year full-time fellowship for individuals from diverse disciplines and career stages with placements offered across EOP, executive departments, the intelligence community, and other agencies, including DPC and NEC.
• Presidential Management Fellowship – a 2-year full-time fellowship for graduate degree holders in any of various executive agencies.

Further reading

• How Presidents Use White House Policy Councils to Manage Administration Priorities, Tevi Troy (2024)
• White House Transition Project: National Economic Council, Scott Bledsoe & Jeremy D. Mayer (2021)
• The Importance of the NEC, Charles Blahous (2016)
• Should you be the next Larry Summers?, Keith Hennessey (2016)
• Roles of the President’s White House economic advisers, Keith Hennessey (2010)
• White House Policy Councils, Michele Jolin & Paul Weinstein Jr. (2008)