The President's Cabinet

8 Key excerpts on "The President's Cabinet"

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  American Government and Politics Today

  The Essentials

  • Barbara Bardes, Mack Shelley, Steffen Schmidt, , Barbara Bardes, Barbara Bardes, Mack Shelley, Steffen Schmidt(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  cabinet An advisory group selected by the president to aid in making decisions. The cabinet includes the heads of fifteen executive departments and others named by the president. 340 Part Four | Political Institutions Copyright 2022 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Image 12.12 Members of the national security team receive an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden in the Situation Room of the White House on May 1, 2011. Those present included Vice President Joe Biden (left), President Barack Obama (second left), Sec- retary of State Hillary Clinton (second right), and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (right). What happened to bin Laden? Pete Souza/The White House/Getty Images • The U.S. trade representative • The vice president • The White House chief of staff Often, a president will use a kitchen cabinet to replace the formal cabinet as a major source of advice. The term kitchen cabinet originated during the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829–37). Jackson relied on the counsel of close friends who allegedly met with him in the kitchen of the White House. A kitchen cabinet is a very informal group of advisers. Usually, they are friends with whom the president worked before being elected. Presidential Use of Cabinets. Because neither the Constitution nor statutory law requires the president to consult with the cabinet, its use is purely discretionary. Some presidents have relied on the counsel of their cabinets more than others.

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  Politics in the USA

  • M.J.C. Vile(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  It is not, however, their only loyalty. As we have seen, they must look also to important figures in Congress, and they must also look to their ‘clientele’. Each of the great departments, even the Department of State, has a clientele, the people they serve and regulate, and to whom they develop a sense of responsibility. Sometimes the identification with a section of the community can become so strong – in the case of the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce and Labor, for example – that their aim seems to be to promote a particular interest to the government, rather than to represent the government itself. This is yet another divisive characteristic, forcing the members of the cabinet to seek individual and confidential contact with the president in order to ensure support. Thus there is an important distinction to be made between the cabinet as a collective body and the individuals who compose it. It is often emphasised, quite rightly, that it is the president who has the final responsibility for decisions. Even if the cabinet were to be unanimously opposed to a presidential policy they could not outvote the president, or veto the policy. It is true also that the president appoints the members of the cabinet and can dismiss them. Yet to see the individual members of the cabinet as the mere creatures of the president is a mistake. They can and do disagree with their master. If the president is determined to overrule them, they will be overruled, but they all operate in a political context. Department heads have their sources of support distinct from the president, and each has many decisions to make, so that the most active and well-informed of presidents cannot be aware of all of them, or afford to try to exercise a continual personal surveillance over them. Individual cabinet members can attain a political influence that may be of some embarrassment to the president, and a very few have even rivalled the president’s authority in their own sphere.

  Given the nature of the American cabinet, it seems difficult to understand why it should have persisted at all as a collective entity, and yet, although it seems at times almost to have ceased to function in this way, there would appear to have been a continuous need for a body of this sort. Presidents need to indicate in some way that the administration is working as a team, and to demonstrate collective support and approval for policies, particularly at times of crisis. A meeting of the cabinet, with its members representing their differing clienteles, authenticates the process of consulting the pluralistic interests that go to make up the American polity, but it represents very little in terms of actual decision-making, for the decisions are taken elsewhere. Similarly, the cabinet fails to make any significant contribution to the solution of that problem of coordinating the activities of the governmental machine that is so critically important in modern government. To help the president to perform this function, therefore, a quite distinct set of institutions has been evolved.

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  Bureaucracy and Administration

  • Ali Farazmand(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • CRC Press

    (Publisher)

  However, their links to the core presidentialist feature (separation of powers) and to the dynamics of bureaucratic politics and administration in America are less well understood. My purpose here, therefore, is to explain some of these linkages. 5.7.1 Cabinet Members Cabinet members cannot be drawn from Congress without undermining the independent authority of the president. This rule is strengthened by, though it does not depend on, Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution, which states that “No Person holding any Offi ce under the United States shall be a Member of either House during his Continuance in Offi ce” (the Constitution of the Fifth Republic has a similar rule, but French elected politicians may hold cabinet posts by surrendering their parliamentary seats). Moreover, American cabinet members cannot safely be recruited from career offi cials without jeopardizing the independence and leadership capabilities of the president. If neither elected politicians nor career offi cers can staff a cabinet, the only remaining option for the president is to select outsiders, that is, transients, to head government departments. They necessarily lack the inside knowledge and experience of careerists. Moreover, since they cannot count on remaining in government service after the current president leaves offi ce, conflicts of interest arise based on cross currents between an offi cial’s duties and his or her former and prospective employers in the private sector. Although transients holding cabinet posts in a presidentialist regime can exercise more power, individually, than any bureaucrats do in parliamentary regimes, their real power is inherently less than that of the elected politicians who serve in parliamentary cabinets. Moreover, their collective Bureaucratic Links between Administration and Politics 97 power, as a “cabinet,” is far less because they do not have to act collegially to keep the government in power.

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  American Government and Politics Today, Enhanced

  • Lynne Ford, Barbara Bardes, Steffen Schmidt, Mack Shelley(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  446 PART IV ● POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS secretaries. At the beginning of Franklin Roosevelt’s tenure in the White House, the entire staff consisted of 37 employees. With the New Deal and World War II, however, the presidential staff became a sizable organization. Today, the executive organization includes a White House office staff of about 600, including part-time employees and others who are borrowed from their departments by the White House. The more than 460 employees who work in the White House Office are closest to the president. The employees who work for the numerous councils and advisory groups support the presi- dent on policy and coordinate the work of departments. Cabinet members, each of whom is the principal officer of a government department, are perhaps the president’s most helpful advisors. The Cabinet Although the Constitution does not include the word cabinet, it does state that the president “may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments.” All presidents have turned to an advisory group, or cabinet, for counsel. Members of the Cabinet Originally, the cabinet consisted of only four officials— the secretaries of state, treasury, and war and the attorney general. Today, the cabinet numbers 14 department secretaries and the attorney general. The cabinet may include others as well. The president can, at his or her discretion, ascribe cab- inet rank to the vice president, the head of the Office of Management and Budget, the national security adviser, the ambassador to the United Nations, or others. Often, a president will use a kitchen cabinet to replace the formal cabinet as a major source of advice. The term kitchen cabinet originated during the presidency of Andrew Jackson, who relied on the counsel of close friends who often met with him in the kitchen of the White House. A kitchen cabinet is an informal group of advisers—usually, friends with whom the president worked before being elected.

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  Administering the Summit

  Administration of the Core Executive in Developed Countries

  • NA NA(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  This entourage provides a political buffer between the cabinet secretaries and their agendas on the one hand and the White House and its agencies on the other. The contrast here with European cabinet governments could not be more striking. While it is infrequently the case that cabinet governments are happy little families, they are a collective entity required at least to reach collective, if not always harmonious, deci- sions about what the government is to do. The US cabinet, by contrast, is not really a cabinet, but a set of department heads. Cabinet officials, agency heads, and EOP and White House officials are a large extended and sometimes dysfunctional family whose quarrels are rarely kept inside locked doors. Cabinet meetings are rarely substantive in the US. Policy direction sometimes depends upon the reading of tea leaves because presidential leadership is often implicit rather than explicitly stated. Inasmuch as the US executive does not have an institutionalized meeting point when ideas and proposals are given priority, it is often in a president's interest to allow everyone to think their ideas and pet projects are in play until evidence to the opposite accumulates. The cost, how- ever, is that all of the actors seek to jockey for position and to find ways of enticing the White House to their side. In this struggle, which can take a wide variety of forms, White House and EOP staff operate close to the president and with little inheritance from the past. By contrast, agency and department heads have disadvantages of distance, multiple constituencies and overseers, and the respon- sibility of operating on the legacy of the past. The advantages clearly belong to the EOP units and senior personnel. The organizational distinctions between officials are, however, often fudged in reality. There is in the US, certainly by contrast with virtually any other executive centre, an immense staff organized exclusively around the president.

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  The Constitutional Systems of the Commonwealth Caribbean

  A Contextual Analysis

  • Derek O'Brien(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Hart Publishing

    (Publisher)

  4 The Executive Introduction – The Prime Minister and the Cabinet – The Public Service – Conclusion PART I: INTRODUCTION T HE CABINET SYSTEM of government, which provides for the government to be drawn from and accountable to the legislature, was introduced into the Commonwealth Caribbean somewhat belatedly by the Colonial Office in the years following the Second World War, as the apparatus of ‘Crown Colony rule’ was gradually dismantled and the region prepared for independence. Unsurprisingly, having fought so long to attain it, this was the system favoured by the region’s political leaders for their newly independent countries and was, accordingly, enshrined in all the Independence Constitutions. Each thus incorporated, either expressly or by implica-tion, the unwritten conventions that underpinned the operation of the Cabinet system of government as it had been evolving in Britain since the mid-nineteenth century. Under the Cabinet system executive authority is vested in the head of state, while executive power is vested in the Cabinet, comprising the Prime Minister and such other ministers from among the members of the legislature as the Prime Minister selects. The Cabinet is the principal instrument of policy and it is the Cabinet that is, collectively , charged with the general direction and control of government: deciding issues of policy, both domestic and foreign, and how public money should and should not be spent. Since independence, only one country in the region has departed from this template and that is Guyana, which in 1980 abandoned the tra-ditional Cabinet system in favour of an executive presidency, though it has more recently reverted to a semi-presidential system of government. 102 The Executive In this chapter I will begin by outlining the constitutional framework within which Cabinet government functions for all countries in the region, with the exception of Guyana, which I will deal with separately.

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  Italy

  From the 1st to the 2nd Republic

  • Stephen P. Koff, Sondra Z. Koff(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In 1983 an inner cabinet system was developed. It was called the Council of the Cabinet (Del Vescovo 1988), and as part of the sweeping changes made by Law Number 400 it was given legal status. The Prime Minister selects the members of the council, who, from a political perspective, must represent all parties of the coalition. As often happens with ‘super-ministries’ or ‘kitchen cabinets’ in other political systems, the council has been somewhat controversial. The debate centres on whether having a council of a few select ministers creates a two-level cabinet, reducing some of the power and influence of those who are not part of the council. Furthermore, it is charged that having two levels of ministers undermines the unity and collective responsibility of the cabinet (Martines 1990). On the other hand, supporters of the idea argue that the council can consider major problems more efficiently by limiting the voices that have to be heard. Also, it gives greater flexibility of action.

  In a way similar to other major Western parliamentary systems, the cabinet operates through a system of committees. It is the responsibility of these committees, which handle special subjects, to examine problems or proposed legislation before the whole cabinet considers them. There are certain groups, known as interministerial committees, which have become standing organs, and these have considerable power. Examples include one which determines the prices of some essential goods and services, and the Interministerial Committee on Economic Planning which develops the budget and national economic programmes and harmonizes national economic policy with that of the EU. Usually the Prime Minister presides over these committees, but frequently the Vice-Prime Minister fulfils the role. Ministers with a special interest in a topic are invited to attend meetings when such a subject is discussed. There have been charges that these committees have assumed too much of the work of the cabinet. At least in part, Law Number 400 addressed this issue when it called for greater vigilance on the part of the Prime Minister over the activities of these committees.

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  The Constitution of Japan

  A Contextual Analysis

  • Shigenori Matsui(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Hart Publishing

    (Publisher)

  Moreover, it has been pointed out that the bureaucrats in the executive departments have strong policy-making power and politicians are not effectively controlling them. Is this true? What are the reasons for this criticism? What reforms are needed? In this chapter, we will examine the status of the Cabinet and the Prime Minister, the power of the Cabinet and the relationship between the Cabinet and the Diet. We will also examine the interface between the politicians and bureaucrats inside the executive departments; we will explore past reforms and the future reform agenda. PART I: THE STATUS OF THE CABINET AND THE PRIME MINISTER THE CABINET Chapter V: The Cabinet of the Japanese Constitution is devoted to the Cabinet and executive power. According to this chapter, executive power shall be vested in the Cabinet (article 65). The Cabinet is a collegial body consisting of the Prime Minister, who shall be its head, and other Ministers of State, as provided for by law (article 66, section 1). Unlike in the United States, where executive power is given to the President, Japan has adopted the system of giving executive power to the collegiate body. The Prime Minister shall be designated from among the members of the Diet by a resolution of the Diet. This designation shall precede all other business (article 67, section 1). If the House of Representatives and the House of Councillors disagree and if no agreement can be reached even through a joint committee of both Houses, provided for by law, or the House of Councillors fails to make designation within ten days, exclusive of the period of recess, after the House of Representatives has made designation, the decision of the House of Representatives shall be the decision of the Diet (article 67, section 2). The Emperor then appoints the Prime Minister (article 6, section 1). The Prime Minister shall appoint the Ministers of State (article 68). The Prime Minister can appoint non-members of the Diet as Ministers

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