THE designation “little president” that has often been attached to the Office of the Executive Secretary is not one that Lucas Bersamin finds particularly appropriate. “That has been used every now and then in the Philippine setting,” Bersamin said. “But that is a very vague description. It’s a misnomer.” The former chief justice, who served as President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s executive secretary from September 2022 until his departure in November 2025, sat down for an exclusive interview with The Manila Times on Jan. 13. The position of executive secretary (ES) is paradoxically one of the most high-profile positions in government while being the one of the least-understood by the public, and evidently even by other government officials. It has its legal basis in the 1987 Administrative Code of the Philippines, which provides a very detailed description of the authority and duties of the executive secretary. But in listening to Bersamin describe his time in office, it became apparent that the work of the ES is determined as much by the idiosyncrasies of the sitting president as it is by the law. “This [position] has no equivalent in the United States or elsewhere, except as that of a chief of staff,” Bersamin said, “because the executive secretary is really the head of the Cabinet, or rather as the most senior of the Cabinet secretaries. So it always fell on me to give guidance [to the other Cabinet secretaries] directly from the president.” As Bersamin described it, the role of the executive secretary, at least during his time, was largely representative in a ministerial context: Representing the president to the public or the rest of the Cabinet when, for whatever reason, the president himself could not, and representing the administration as a whole when some unified message needed to be conveyed. Other primary duties included overseeing the proper formulation of executive orders, and keeping information flowing smoothly from the various secretaries to the president. Bersamin said despite being considered “first among peers” among the Cabinet, he had no influence over the workings of what he called the line delivery departments. “I never went into the details,” he said, since that was beyond the purview of the ES as established in the Administrative Code. “The only time I saw something was when it was being submitted to the president. For example, something might come from the DBM (Department of Budget and Management). Of course, I had to go through it, but unless there was anything wrong, palpably wrong, I would forward it.” Otherwise, it would simply be returned to the DBM for correction. “It’s more or less a ministerial function. I was the filter of the president, but nothing about decision-making,” he added. One of the most public functions of the executive secretary, at least under Marcos, is his designation as “’caretaker” of the government while the president is out of the country. This is largely where the idea of the ES as the “little president” originates. Since the falling-out between President Marcos and Vice President Sara Duterte, the caretaker arrangement is usually one where the executive secretary and another Cabinet secretary — the job has recently alternated among the solicitor general, Justice secretary and secretary of Agrarian Reform — form a “caretaker panel” to stand in for the president in his absence. However, thanks to modern communications, Bersamin said, the role of the caretakers is limited. “There is a misconception about the caretaker panel, what it does,” Bersamin said. “Actually, that is not a necessary office or panel, because the president can directly give orders from wherever he is in the planet,” as he has his own close staff at hand monitoring circumstances back home, he said. “We are there only for the physical representation of an authority that is still in power.” Beyond these functions, the executive secretary is also considered the closest advisor of the president, although the ES shares that responsibility with the Presidential Management Staff, which is primarily the Office of the President’s research arm and the Special Advisor to the President, which is primarily concerned with political and legislative matters. However, this arrangement is somewhat fluid. “It’s always his (the president’s) call,” Bersamin said. The president can and often does speak directly to the Cabinet officials, and “he may not consult me at all, because I’m not bound to give him good advice. He may have other close people, sometimes people not even in government who are advising him. I cannot control that,” he added. Bersamin admitted to being a bit frustrated by the access of a large number of close confidants to the president and the first lady, although he was quick to emphasize that he did not criticize the president for it. “I was becoming unhappy with so many people going over my head more than a year ago,” Bersamin said, not because the president was necessarily getting bad advice, but because it was making Bersamin’s job of keeping things organized more difficult. Nonetheless, he felt duty-bound to soldier on. “[I] cannot just leave and abandon something, because [I] don’t know the impact,” he said. “The situation was diffused,” Bersamin added. “I’m not giving excuses; that’s just the reality. I mean, doesn’t every president have this idiosyncrasy? All of ours have.” When asked why he would take on an evidently difficult job, and one that, in his case, ended somewhat controversially, Bersamin grew thoughtful. “You know, I didn’t need the job,” he said. “I’m retired, I have a good pension equal to my salary when I was chief justice (from 2018 to 2019), I have other things to do. But when I got the call from the president asking me to come on board,” sometime in mid-September 2022, “I could not say no. I was being called to serve my country.” As a parting thought, Bersamin made it clear that occasionally being in the crosshairs and wrestling with competing political interests have not shaken his faith in the country’s leadership. “I still believe in the administration,” he said simply. “Up to now, I still believe.”