My essential understanding is that cabinet positions do not have to be fulfiled in an official sense, but can be filled by other people in addition to their own cabinet position. So, the Secretary of Transportation, for example, could be a collaborative effort between the other cabinet positions.
Just put someone temporarily there for 4 years..
The President is the executive branch, he can leave any cabinet position open and direct the lower officers to run that department as he sees fit.
> Could he leave the slot open and announce his nominee is now a Special Advisor to him in charge of that department? <
Good question. My layman’s guess is that an Acting Secretary would work, but not a Special Advisor.
And that’s because a Special Advisor has no authority to issue orders to the department. So he certainly would be ignored by the rank-and-file in that department.
All a Special Advisor could do is report every last problem to Trump, and then Trump would have to issue the orders directly. Rather inefficient.
The only reason a CEO has managers under him is the way large organizations must be run. The leader sets the policies he thinks will lead to success. He chooses subordinates to implement those policies. The subordinate turns the leader’s ideas into real, functioning mechanisms. That job can be extremely complex. The subordinate saves the leader from getting mired in the weeds, which is what happens to over-controlling leaders. Even if the CEO wants to wind down and eventually delete a department, say Education, it takes someone to handle that so as to prevent a “leaving Afghanistan” level disaster.
Reagan’s success and Trump’s business success relied on finding the right people to turn policy into mechanism.
yes
Trump “Until my cabinet is in place I order all immigration ports closed and no entry by anyone other than citizens is probibitied entry to the United States. Thank you.”
I think he can appointing acting members under the Vacancies Act. These people can serve for 210 days.
Hope you didn’t spend too many hours dreaming up this cr**.
However, my understanding is that the President has a lot of leeway in changing the lines of succession in each department in the event a vacancy arises.
Of course. A cabinet position is merely a department head operating under the President. The President is in charge of all Executive Branch departments.
If there are no appointed leaders in place then he should halt Agency spending and everyone in the Agency gets terminated, effective immediately, and the Agency facilities and records revert to GSA and NARA.
Take a look at the Inspector General for the Department of State position when Hillary was in the position.
June 3, 2015
““Where Are All the Watchdogs?” to keep track of ongoing vacancies in the IG system. Our vacancy tracker shows how long IG offices have been headed by an acting official, and, in the case of IGs appointed by the President, how long a nominee has been waiting for Senate confirmation.
As of today,(June 3, 2015) there are seven vacancies at presidentially appointed IG positions, one vacancy at an agency-appointed position, and three nominees awaiting confirmation. The shortest vacancy is at the Central Intelligence Agency, which has gone 123 days without a permanent IG or a nominee. The longest vacancy is at the Interior Department, which has now gone almost 2,300 days without a permanent IG, making it the longest IG vacancy of the Obama Administration.”
The Department lacked a permanent watchdog for Hillary Clinton’s entire four-year tenure as Secretary of State, the longest vacancy since the position was created in 1957.
These excerpts are from an excellent article, written in 2015 on how Obama appointed “Acting” positions as watchdogs, thus bypassing senate approval.
“Rule by decree” is not really the language you want to use in America.
Leave the position empty. An empty chair does not draw a paycheck.
Freeze all spending for that department by executive order.
Go through the management levels until you find a qualified leader. Terminate the employment of everybody above that person along the way.
Have the new leader put up "going out of business" signs everywhere.
Eliminate that cabinet post and department in the next annual budget, which should be approved by Congress before 9/30/25, the end of this fiscal year.
Instead of a Special Advisor or Acting Secretary, President Trump could just do what Obama and Biden did and essentially appoint that unelected/unconfirmed person to a “Czar” position.
Trump could staff White House positions with people who sit in some executive branch agency/office, get requests for authorizations/approvals/commands from its staff, relays them to the White House and the White House issue orders to the agency/office concerned.
And this is Defense. DoD must have a Secretary confirmed asap -- they are 6th in the line of presidential succession, they are part of any Cabinet-enforced scenarios like 25A, etc.
Recess appointments can serve ~200 days, and then be extended another ~200 days
One issue is that there are a bunch of laws that give specific grants of power to the Secretary of the various departments. Presumably, if there is no Secretary, those powers cannot be exercised.