Every other Tuesday, the team behind Civics 101 joins NHPR’s All Things Considered host Julia Furukawa to talk about how our democratic institutions actually work.
With a new presidential administration, comes a new U.S. Cabinet.
This week, Civics 101 host Nick Capodice joins Julia to talk about what the Cabinet does, how it’s changed over history, and how much power a Cabinet officer actually has within the agency.
Transcript
So how has the role of the Cabinet changed over time? What is its role today?
Well, Julia, like so many features of our government, we look to the precedent held by the first people who held the job. So George Washington had a very small Cabinet, only four officers. It was the attorney general and the secretaries of war, state and the treasury. The latter two, notably, being Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. Washington picked Hamilton and Jefferson because they were the smartest people he knew. He needed their advice, and they argued with each other constantly to decide how the country should be run. That's what the Cabinet did. They figured out how to run stuff.
But eventually, as we added more and more departments and those departments started running agencies of the executive branch, a branch today that has about 4 million employees, the Cabinet became less about advising the president and more like CEOs each running their own department.
The Senate has to approve of Cabinet nominations. How rigorous is that process?
That's right, it says in Article II [of the U.S. Constitution] the Senate must advise and consent to Cabinet nominations. The rigor of the process really depends on the candidate. Ultimately, the Senate needs a simple majority to confirm a nominee, and they hold confirmation hearings and ask questions.
So what's interesting to me, Julia, is that the more controversial the nominee is, the more drawn out and dramatic the confirmation process is going to be. And the Senate spends a lot of time in these hearings. So if they go on for a while, that means the Senate isn't doing anything else. This can spell disaster for an incoming president's new term, because the Senate is so busy with these hearings, they can't put forward the new president's agenda, the legislation that got them elected in the first place. So a president really doesn't want to anger the Senate with nominations that will inevitably fail.
And how much power does a Cabinet officer actually have on the agency?
Well, that's an interesting question, because it seems like at first blush, they have all the power, right? They're the new CEO of the Department of Education or whatever. However, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that most of these agencies have been around a long, long time. They have thousands, in some cases, hundreds of thousands of employees who've been doing things a certain way for decades.
So a new secretary can hire people and fire people. But at the end of the day, they still have a job to do. And what sometimes happens is that a person can be appointed to a Cabinet position to, in essence, destroy an agency. Like, say you pick an anti-environmentalist to run the EPA. No matter who that person is, they still go to work every day in that agency. They learn how it runs. They interact with people who have worked there for years and often, these new appointees end up caring about the agency that they were sent to sabotage.
