White House Appoints Director of Strategic Ambiguity; Job Description Remains, Appropriately, Unclear

Washington, D.C. — On a Tuesday that the White House described as "a busy day for personnel announcements," the administration quietly named Katherine Hollis as Director of Strategic Ambiguity, a senior advisory position that carries a GS-equivalent salary in the high five figures, an office somewhere in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, and a mandate that three separate press aides, contacted independently, described using three entirely different sets of words that shared no meaningful overlap.

Hollis, 51, brings to the role a background in strategic communications, interagency coordination, and what her official biography calls "navigating complex institutional environments," which could describe almost any job in Washington and therefore describes this one perfectly.

A Position With History, Sort Of

The Office of Strategic Ambiguity — or the Strategic Ambiguity Directorate, or the Senior Advisor for Strategic Ambiguity, depending on which agency's internal directory you consult — has existed in some form since at least 1996, when it appears for the first time in a White House organizational chart as a small unlabeled box connected by a dotted line to the Deputy Chief of Staff's office.

Dotted lines, in Washington organizational charts, indicate an advisory relationship with no formal authority. They also, coincidentally, indicate a position that can be funded, staffed, and operated without ever appearing in a budget request that requires Congressional approval. Whether this was intentional is one of several questions about the office that nobody has been able to answer with confidence.

"It's one of those positions that's always just been there," said a former White House staffer who served in two administrations and asked not to be identified. "Like a piece of furniture you stop noticing. You don't know who bought it. You don't know if anyone owns it. But every time someone tries to move it, three different departments send strongly worded memos."

The office has had eleven directors since its possible founding, a number arrived at by cross-referencing White House staff directories, Federal Register notices, and a LinkedIn search that produced seven profiles claiming the title in various formulations, two of which belong to the same person under different name spellings.

The Previous Director: A Case Study in Strategic Absence

Hollis's predecessor, identified in White House records as either James Carrow or James Carreau depending on the document, held the position from 2019 until his departure date, which is listed as four different months across four different agency databases.

Carrow/Carreau — sources familiar with him suggest the correct spelling is Carrow, though one former colleague insists it's Carreau "with an accent, which he was very particular about" — appeared at no public White House events during his tenure and issued no public statements. His name appears in the budget ledgers of the National Security Council, the Office of Management and Budget, and, inexplicably, the Department of Agriculture, each listing a slightly different salary figure and a slightly different job title.

Attempts to reach him for comment were unsuccessful. His personal email bounced. His White House email address redirects to a general inquiry form. His LinkedIn profile, which lists his current position as "Strategic Advisor (Various)," has not been updated since 2020.

Officials at the White House, when asked about the gap between Carrow's departure and Hollis's appointment — a period of approximately fourteen months — described it as "a natural transition interval" and declined to elaborate.

What Does the Director of Strategic Ambiguity Actually Do?

This is, genuinely, the central question, and it is not one that the White House's communications office was prepared to answer with anything resembling specificity.

The official announcement described Hollis's role as providing "senior-level counsel on matters requiring calibrated communication frameworks across interagency and external stakeholder environments." A follow-up question asking what that means in practice produced a second statement describing the role as "supporting the administration's commitment to nuanced, context-sensitive messaging in complex policy landscapes."

A third inquiry, submitted in writing, received a response that used the phrase "strategic ambiguity" six times without defining it.

Former holders of the position, those reachable, were not substantially more illuminating. Patricia Vance, who held the role from 2008 to 2012, described her work as "essentially being available to help senior officials think through how to say things that needed to be said without being said directly." When pressed on whether that was different from what press secretaries and communications directors do, she said, "It's complementary. We operated in the space between what they said and what they meant."

Richard Holbrook — no relation to the more famous Richard Holbrooke — who held the position in 2003 and 2004, was more candid. "I honestly spent most of my time attending meetings where my presence was meant to signal something without anyone having to explain what it signaled," he said. "I was a human footnote."

The Budget Question

Perhaps the most structurally interesting aspect of the Office of Strategic Ambiguity is its financing, which appears to operate on what government accountability experts describe as a "distributed ambiguity model," a term they acknowledged coining specifically for this article.

The office's operational costs — staff salaries, travel, office supplies, and what budget documents refer to as "strategic engagement activities" — are distributed across at least three departmental budgets, none of which lists the office as a primary line item. The NSC's contribution appears under "Advisory Support Functions." The OMB's contribution appears under "Interagency Coordination." The Department of Agriculture's contribution, which has appeared consistently since at least 2003 and amounts to approximately $47,000 annually, appears under a subheading that reads, in its entirety, "Other."

Senator Patricia Drummond (R-TX), a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said her office had flagged the Agriculture allocation in 2021 and received a letter explaining that it "reflects a longstanding interagency cost-sharing arrangement supporting cross-departmental advisory capacity." She described the letter as "technically words in a row."

No one at the Department of Agriculture, when contacted by The Proceedings Today, was aware that their budget contained a line item for the Office of Strategic Ambiguity. Two officials said they would look into it. Neither followed up.

Hollis Herself

Katherine Hollis, for her part, accepted the appointment with a statement that was, in retrospect, entirely appropriate for the role.

"I'm honored to join the administration in this capacity and look forward to contributing to the important work ahead," the statement read, in full.

When a reporter at the announcement briefing asked Hollis to describe what the important work ahead actually involved, she smiled, nodded, and said, "I think the statement speaks to that."

It does not.

Hollis will begin in her new role on a date that the White House described as "to be confirmed," reporting to an official whose title the press office listed differently in two consecutive emails, operating out of an office whose room number has not been publicly released, with a staff whose size is, in the words of the official announcement, "appropriately scaled to the mission."

Experts say the position is unlikely to be eliminated, since doing so would require someone to first explain what it does, and explaining what it does would, by definition, undermine the entire point of having it.

The Proceedings Today will continue seeking clarification. We are not optimistic.