The article explores how analysts working within central agencies perceive their own organization. At first glance perceived as mysterious, powerful and irrefutable, central agencies appear, through the accounts of the participants’ experience, as unique federal organizations, due to their horizontality and a certain circumvention of the bureaucratic logic. Unlike their counterparts in line departments, central agency analysts interact with more experienced and hierarchically superior “departmental clients”. The disproportionate influence they exert on the latter is paradoxical insofar as it is often young analysts, freshly recruited from university programs, who find themselves exercising these important central agency responsibilities. The human dimension of the experience at the center suggests, right from recruiting stages, very demanding work environments, where injunctions for surpassing oneself and achieving results at all costs induce stress for analysts, who are called upon to interact regularly with senior leaders and key political players in the federal government. The use of hermeneutical phenomenology and an appropriate methodological apparatus for qualitative research allow us to take a fresh look at central agencies by emphasizing the intersubjective experience of analysts and their interlocutors. In accordance with the social construction perspective, according to which the social world, and by extension organizations, stems from the interactions between individuals who are sense makers and meaning producers, the analysts’ experience makes it possible to understand central agencies as specific social systems.