Is zealous advocacy for its preferred policies on the part of presidential administrations right or wrong? Should the president and his staff overstate the benefits, understate the risks?
My own view is that, while administrations may advocate for their own policies, they should never propagandize for them and there is an ethical obligation for administrations to present a balanced view. Administrations should never lie to Congress and lying to the public, although occasionally necessary, should be a rarity.
This is Lord Brougham’s famous description of a lawyer’s duty to give zealous advocacy to a client:
“[A]n advocate, in the discharge of his duty, knows but one person in all the world, and that person is his client. To save that client by all means and expedients, and at all hazards and costs to other persons, and, among them, to himself, is his first and only duty; and in performing this duty he must not regard the alarm, the torments, the destruction which he may bring upon others. Separating the duty of a patriot from that of an advocate, he must go on reckless of consequences, though it should be his unhappy fate to involve his country in confusion.”
A President who has his own policy as his client, has a fool for a lawyer. A President can have his country as a client, can advocate for a variety of principles, or simply try to make meaningful improvements as seem feasible at the time, but not his own policy.