Working at the White House is all about telling people you work at the White House. And of course, sharing just how many hours you spend working there. Your apparel should match: Shirts should be unpressed, shoes un-shined.Tie and suit styles should be frozen in time to the exact month when you first started working at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And when others dress up for a big meeting, remember to keep your tie loose, your sleeves rolled. This is your house after all.

The best-dressed men in national security are from the Treasury and Justice Departments. As more young people are drawn to public service, these two institutions compete with New York for top law- and business-school grads. Those grads, for their part, embrace public service, but make clear to their colleagues that they could be on Wall Street or at a white-shoe law firm (Note: Nobody actually wears white shoes) if they really wanted. For the young lawyer, that means nicely tailored, conservative, dark suits. The Treasury Department is more freewheeling, with flashy suits, distinctive (but never flamboyant) socks, and monk-strap shoes (literally the only place in the government where people wear monk-strap shoes).

To understand the FBI’s style, you need to understand that agents think of themselves as something of a cross between a detective and a spy. Suits are sharper than those worn by The Wire’s McNulty but still oversized so that a pistol can be easily concealed. Haircuts are short but stylish. FBI agents also love men’s hardware, such as cufflinks, tie clips, lapel pins—little flashes of bling that make the detective into an agent.

The worst-dressed award goes to the Department of Defense. But it’s really not their fault. The Pentagon’s dominant culture is current and former military officers, who spent their formative fashion years in uniform. By the time they have to wear a suit on a daily basis, the siren song of the discount men’s stores that dot northern Virginia is too much to resist, and tailoring just isn’t a priority. And so they stream into the Pentagon wearing ill-fitting suits with odd patterns, the loose sleeves of their yellow and teal dress shirts billowing in the cold rush of A/C leaving the building, their too-matchy ties tangled up with ID-badge lanyards bearing the insignias of their favorite NFL teams. Yet after so many years in uniform, the men have one redeeming sartorial quality: immaculately polished dress shoes.

The split personality of the intelligence community is on full display in its fashion. The analysts—the office guys who make sense of the fire hose of information flowing into the government—come in two forms. There are those who spend hours in windowless buildings, living on gummy bears, and Monster energy drinks, while they listen to wire taps or stare at drone footage. They dress accordingly: old khakis, short-sleeve dress shirts, scuffed loafers. And then there are the young men in a hurry, the executive briefer analysts. They walk quickly through the halls of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, with their carefully pressed, slightly oversized—but never offensive—Jos. A. Bank suits and shirts, ready to jump into a black car at any moment and run downtown to brief a deputy assistant undersecretary of strategic initiatives. After all, a serendipitous moment of face time for a smart (and well-dressed) young man could launch an illustrious career.