Posted on 11/20/2014 3:27:27 PM PST by SES1066
With President Obama expanding on his power, an amateur historian like myself looks to past growth of the Executive Branch and in this post looking at the number of Cabinet (Departmental) positions and their growth.
How many can give the number of these positions currently and how that has changed? It is an interesting progression and given my preference for minimalist governance, frightening!
John Adams added (1798) #6 Dept. of the Navy.
Zachary Taylor added (1849) #7 Interior.
Grover Cleveland added (1889) #8 Agriculture.
Theodore Roosevelt added (1903) #9 Commerce & Labor.
Woodrow Wilson separated the above into exclusive Departments (1913) #10.
Harry Truman REDUCED (kinda) War & Navy into (1947) #9 Defense.
Dwight Eisenhower added (1953) #10 Health, Education & Welfare.
Lyndon B Johnson added (1965) #11 Housing & Urban Development (HUD).
" added (1966) #12 Transportation.
Richard Nixon REDUCED (1971) #11 Postmaster General (USPS).
Jimmy Carter added (1977) #12 Energy.
" added (1979) #13 Education out of HEW->HHS.
George H W Bush added (1989) #14 Veterans Affairs.
George W Bush added (2003) #15 Homeland Security.
From 5 to 15, yes we have grown as a country in size, population and (perhaps) complexity but do you think all of these people are necessary? FYI: It has been reported that President Obama has held only 4 meetings of the full Cabinet!?
How about the useless, wasteful, and dangerous $1,000,000,000,000 Dept of HHS? Good place to start. Nuke it.
Current presidential cabinet.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/cabinet
I thought the speaker of the house was somewhere in the line of succession to the Presidency
VP, then Speaker of the House isn’t it?
That’s what I thought.
Is there any bigger strap hanger than Energy?
They were created to ensure energy independence and it took actual private initiative to move towards it in spite of the government.
That should be the first dissolved cabinet.
The White House.gov page lists members of the Presidents administration. The Speaker of The House of Representatives is not a part of the Presidents administration.
Reagan signed the bill. It just didn't take effect until after he'd left office.
Nixon had a plan in the 1970s to reduce seven cabinet departments and a variety of agencies into four departments (Natural Resources, Human Resources, Economic Affairs, and Community Development).
We can certainly speculate about whether it would have been a good idea or not -- whether one cabinet member could deal with all the responsibilities involved in each megadepartment -- but Nixon's plan didn't go anywhere. Special interests (labor, agriculture, commerce) preferred having departments all to themselves.
By way of comparison, the British cabinet is considerably larger, and includes officials with various status. For example, they can have "ministers without portfolio" -- members of parliament from the ruling party who didn't have any specific responsibilities for administration but met with the cabinet because it was thought important to have them in the room.
We also have officials like the UN ambassador, US trade representative, White House chief of staff, and heads of the EPA, SBA, OMB, etc. who have cabinet level rank but who aren't administering fully-fledged departments. It's said that regular cabinet meetings are a thing of the past. The president and White House staff take care of details and meet one-on-one with the department heads.
VP, then Speaker of the House, the President Pro Tem of the Senate, then Cabinet Officers in the order listed. (Incidentally, after the Vice President, the order of succession is not set in the Constitution, but can be changed by Congress. [U.S. Constitution, Article II, section 1, clause 6]).
We now have, “Czars” silly.
Ping
The list, Ping
Let me know if you would like to be on or off the ping list
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.