The White House takes control of the press pool from the correspondents' association
On February 25, 2025, press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced that the White House, not the White House Correspondents' Association, would decide which reporters sit in the presidential press pool, ending decades of the press corps organizing its own rotation. The change came two weeks after the AP was barred from the Oval Office over "Gulf of America."
What happened
The pool is the small rotating group of reporters and camera crews that follows the president into spaces too small for the full press corps: the Oval Office, Air Force One, small events. For decades its composition and rotation were set by the White House Correspondents' Association, an independent body of credentialed journalists. On February 25, 2025, Leavitt announced from the briefing room that the White House press team would now determine the pool, saying, "A select group of D.C. based journalists should no longer have a monopoly over the privilege of press access at the White House." She said legacy outlets would still be included but rotated, and that new outlets would be added. The WHCA's president, Eugene Daniels, responded: "This tears at the independence of a free press. In a free country, leaders must not be able to choose their own press corps." The announcement followed the White House's February 11 exclusion of the Associated Press from the Oval Office and Air Force One, and the AP's February 21 lawsuit.
Why it matters
The pool decides who is in the room when the president acts, and the footage and notes it produces are what every other outlet relies on. Moving its composition from the press corps to the press office gives the White House the power to reward and exclude by invitation, with no rule to appeal to. It is the mechanism that made the September 2026 removal of CNN from the television pool possible without any further change to the rules.