The White House complex -- formally called the Executive Office of the President, or EOP -- is made up of more than a dozen offices and about 4,000 staffers who craft White House policy and support the president. It includes the White House itself, the National Security Council, the Office of Management and Budget, and other federal agencies.
Property of the People, a Washington-based nonprofit transparency group, successfully sued to force the administration to release the visitor logs and calendars of top agency officials from five agencies within the White House complex: the Office of Management and Budget; the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative; the Office of National Drug Control Policy; the Office of Science and Technology Policy; and the Council on Environmental Quality.
The court held that these agencies are subject to public disclosure through the Freedom of Information Act, even if the White House itself is not. The Trump administration refuses to release visitor logs for the White House, citing "grave national security risks and privacy concerns of the hundreds of thousands of visitors annually.”
The Obama White House also initially refused to release a list of its visitors, as had previous administrations. But in 2009, facing four lawsuits from government transparency groups and increasing public scrutiny, the Obama administration began voluntarily posting records of those who came in and out of the White House itself online.
The dataset covers the period between Jan. 20, the day of Trump’s inauguration, and about Sept. 6, although the date ranges differ by agency. The download includes both the original PDFs provided by the administration, as well as our CSV version of the data, used in our story, "Here Are the White House Visitor Records the Trump Administration Didn’t Want You to See."
The government redacted the names of some White House complex visitors, citing privacy reasons. Property of the People and the government are negotiating for the release of names currently redacted in some of the visitor logs and calendars. We plan to publish additional data, likely disclosed on a quarterly basis, as it becomes available.
The government noted in its response to Property of the People’s open-records request that it couldn’t guarantee that every visitor’s name was logged. In some cases, where we couldn’t confirm the proper spelling of handwritten names or other text, we noted entries as “illegible.”
The government redacted the names of some White House complex visitors, citing privacy reasons. Property of the People and the government are negotiating for the release of names currently redacted in some of the visitor logs and calendars. We plan to publish additional data, likely disclosed on a quarterly basis, as it becomes available.
The government noted in its response to Property of the People’s open-records request that it couldn’t guarantee that every visitor’s name was logged. Because the visitor logs and calendars are produced by the agencies themselves, meeting details might be mislabeled or incorrect. In some cases, where we couldn’t confirm the proper spelling of handwritten names or other text, we noted entries as “illegible.”
