Separating fact from fiction regarding the size of Michelle Obama's staff

OBAMA FOR USA

In the past it's been almost a tradition for America's first ladies to catch flack from their husbands' political opponents over the size of their staffs, and Michelle Obama certainly hasn't been exempt from that. Criticism of her "massive" staff has popped up on email chains, blogs, and chat rooms. But what are the facts regarding how many people are under her employ, and how does the size of her staff compare to that of past first ladies?

On July 1st of this year, the Obama White House posted the Annual Report to Congress on White House Staff on its official blog. A minor uproar over the first lady's staff size ensued. One critic at CanadianFreePress.com accused the president's wife of employing an "unprecedented number of staffers" for someone who "doesn’t perform any official duties," while a widely circulated chain email reported that "there has never been anyone in the White House at any time that has created such an army of staffers whose sole duties are the facilitation of the First Lady’s social life." Many other critics of the Obama administration expressed similar sentiments.

Soon after the minor brouhaha erupted, Factcheck.org looked into the matter and discovered that there are 16 White House staffers with the term "first lady" in their job title, along with eight additional staffers who also provide support to Michelle Obama, bringing the total number of paid first lady aides to 24, two more staffers than the number noted in the aforementioned chain email circulated by Obama critics. Michelle Obama's press secretary, Katie McCormick Lelyveld, confirmed that 24 was an accurate count of staffers working for the current first lady.

So just what does a staff of 24 do for Michelle Obama? Well, for starters there are the 32,000 pieces of mail that have flooded the East Wing since Michelle Obama took occupancy in January, but the main official duty of the first lady is to tend to the care and maintenance of the White House and its seemingly endless social functions. Of course some first ladies, like Michelle Obama, maintain a higher profile than others, and with that comes the need for people to help write speeches, arrange travel and security details, handle media inquiries, etc. About the myriad tasks and responsibilities handled by White House staffers, Anita McBride, Laura Bush's former chief of staff, recently said, "There's never enough people to do the amount of work that has to get done."

As far as Michelle Obama's staff size being "unprecedented" in modern times, this appears to be factually inaccurate. According to the Washington Post, the Bush White House also had 16 people on staff whose official titles included the term "first lady" working for Laura Bush, and a recent AP story placed her total number of staffers at between 24 and 26. The same AP report also noted that Hillary Clinton had up to 19 staffers, while Lady Bird Johnson and Jacqueline Kennedy had 30 and 40, respectively. To that end, Snopes.com, another Web site dedicated to checking the facts on issues prominent in the public discourse, described the claims of Michelle Obama's “unprecedented” staff as "grossly inaccurate" and "on par with her predecessor's."

-- Brett Michael Dykes is a contributor to the Yahoo! News Blog.

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