United States federal executive departments

Based on Wikipedia: United States federal executive departments

The President's Fifteen Arms

If the President of the United States died tomorrow, and the Vice President was also incapacitated, and the Speaker of the House couldn't serve, and the President Pro Tempore of the Senate was unavailable—who would run the country?

The answer lies in a surprisingly elegant piece of governmental architecture: the fifteen executive departments. These sprawling bureaucracies, each headed by a secretary appointed by the president, form the backbone of how the federal government actually does things. And their heads stand in a very particular line, waiting—hopefully never—to assume the presidency.

But here's where it gets interesting. The order isn't based on importance or competence or even budget size. It's based on age. The older the department, the closer its secretary stands to the presidency. The Secretary of State goes first among cabinet members because the State Department was created in 1789, just months after George Washington took office. The Secretary of Homeland Security goes last because that department wasn't created until 2002, in the anxious aftermath of September 11th.

There's one exception to this chronological rule. The Secretary of Defense takes the position that would have belonged to the Secretary of War, a department that existed from 1789 until 1947. When the Department of Defense absorbed the old War Department, it inherited its place in line. History, it turns out, has a long memory.

What Makes America Different

If you've ever watched British politics and wondered why cabinet ministers can answer questions in Parliament while serving in government, you've stumbled onto one of the fundamental differences between parliamentary and presidential systems.

In the United Kingdom, cabinet ministers are almost always sitting members of Parliament. The Prime Minister picks colleagues from the legislature to run government departments. This means the people making laws and the people implementing them are often the same individuals, or at least close colleagues who see each other in the hallways of Westminster every day.

The American system works on the opposite principle.

The Constitution's Ineligibility Clause creates an absolute wall between Congress and the executive branch. If a senator gets tapped to become Secretary of State, they must resign their Senate seat before taking office. They can't do both. They can't even try. This isn't a matter of tradition or political norms—it's a constitutional requirement designed to keep the branches of government separate and, theoretically, able to check each other's power.

This leads to some fascinating political chess. When President Obama appointed Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State in 2009, she had to give up her New York Senate seat. A special election eventually filled that vacancy. The executive branch gained her expertise; the legislative branch lost her vote.

The Saxbe Fix: A Constitutional Workaround

There's a wrinkle that sounds like it belongs in a law school exam but actually comes up with surprising regularity.

The Constitution prohibits appointing members of Congress to executive positions if the salary for that position was increased during their congressional term. The reasoning was to prevent legislators from creating cushy jobs for themselves and then immediately jumping ship to fill them.

But here's the problem: salaries for cabinet positions get adjusted regularly, often just for cost-of-living increases. This would technically disqualify most sitting members of Congress from most executive appointments.

The solution, named after Senator William Saxbe, is elegantly simple: just lower the salary back to what it was before the increase. Want to appoint a senator to be Attorney General, but the AG's salary went up last year? Reduce the salary to its previous level, and the constitutional objection disappears.

Is this a legitimate interpretation of the Constitution or a clever evasion of its spirit? Legal scholars have debated this for decades. But it keeps getting used because, practically speaking, it works.

The Strange Economics of Federal Departments

Here's a puzzle. The Department of Education has a budget in the hundreds of billions of dollars. But its actual workforce? Relatively tiny compared to its financial footprint.

The Department of Defense, by contrast, employs millions of people—active duty military, civilians, contractors. Its budget is enormous, but so is its payroll.

What explains this disparity?

The answer reveals something fundamental about how the American federal government works, and it's not what most people assume.

When you think of "the federal government," you might picture vast bureaucracies of federal employees directly providing services to citizens. And for some departments, that's accurate. The Department of Defense really does employ soldiers. The Department of Veterans Affairs really does run hospitals.

But many departments operate completely differently. They're essentially giant checkbooks.

The Department of Education doesn't run schools. It sends money to states and school districts, who then run schools. The Department of Housing and Urban Development doesn't build apartments. It provides grants and subsidies to local housing authorities and private developers, who then build apartments. The Department of Transportation doesn't pave roads. It sends highway funds to state transportation departments, who then hire contractors to pave roads.

This isn't an accident or inefficiency. It's by design.

Why the Money Flows Through States

In the early twentieth century, the federal government began expanding into areas that had traditionally been handled by states: education, healthcare, housing, transportation. But there was a constitutional and political problem. Many of these areas weren't clearly within federal jurisdiction, and there was fierce resistance to Washington simply taking over.

The compromise was grants.

Instead of creating a federal school system, Congress created federal education grants. States could apply for the money—or not. If they applied, they had to follow federal rules. If they didn't want the strings attached, they could decline the funding.

This created a peculiar dance that continues today. The federal government can't directly require states to adopt certain education standards. But it can say: "If you want this money, here are the conditions." States are technically free to refuse. In practice, few do. The money is too significant to turn down.

The result is that federal departments like Education and Transportation are remarkably small for their budgets. Their employees are mostly managing grants, reviewing applications, ensuring compliance. The actual work happens at the state and local level, performed by state and local employees.

The Medicare Exception

Medicare, run by the Department of Health and Human Services, took a different path entirely.

When Medicare was created in 1965, Congress faced a choice. It could create a massive new federal bureaucracy to process claims and manage payments. Or it could piggyback on existing infrastructure.

Congress chose the latter, for two reasons. First, private health insurers already knew how to process medical claims. They had decades of experience, established relationships with hospitals, and the technical systems to handle millions of transactions. Building all that from scratch would have been enormously expensive and time-consuming.

Second—and this was crucial politically—American hospitals preferred dealing with private insurers they knew rather than a new federal agency they didn't. Getting hospital buy-in for Medicare required making the program as familiar and non-threatening as possible.

So Medicare contracted with private insurance companies to serve as fiscal intermediaries. When you get Medicare today, you're technically dealing with the federal government. But the claims processing, the customer service calls, the payment systems—those are often run by companies like Blue Cross Blue Shield operating under federal contracts.

This is why HHS has a massive budget but a workforce that might seem disproportionately small. Much of the actual work is performed by contractors.

The Departments That Never Were

The current fifteen executive departments aren't inevitable. They're the result of decades of political battles, compromises, and historical accidents. Throughout American history, presidents and members of Congress have proposed dozens of departments that were never created.

Some of these proposals seem prescient in hindsight.

In 1881, Secretary of the Treasury William Windom proposed a Department of Industry and Commerce. It took another twenty-two years before the Department of Commerce was finally established in 1903. Sometimes ideas just need time to ripen.

Other proposals keep coming back like persistent ghosts.

A Department of Natural Resources—consolidating the Department of the Interior, the Department of Energy, and the Environmental Protection Agency—was proposed by the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s. Richard Nixon proposed it again in the 1970s. The 1976 Republican Party platform endorsed it. Bill Daley pushed for it in the Clinton years. Each time, the idea failed to gain enough momentum. The bureaucratic empires involved were too entrenched, the political coalitions too fragile.

Perhaps the most idealistic proposal came from one of America's Founding Fathers.

Benjamin Rush's Department of Peace

In 1793, Benjamin Rush—physician, signer of the Declaration of Independence, and genuine revolutionary—proposed creating a Department of Peace to complement the Department of War.

Rush imagined a cabinet secretary whose job would be to promote peace: establishing free schools to teach about peaceful conflict resolution, providing assistance to farmers, funding research into agriculture and manufacturing. While the War Department prepared for conflict, the Peace Department would build the conditions that made conflict unnecessary.

The idea didn't gain traction in Rush's lifetime. But it keeps resurfacing. Senator Matthew Neely introduced legislation for a Department of Peace in the 1930s. Congressman Dennis Kucinich championed the cause in the 2000s, arguing that America needed a cabinet-level advocate for nonviolent solutions just as it had advocates for military strength.

None of these efforts succeeded. But the persistence of the idea across two centuries suggests something about the American psyche: a hope, perhaps never quite abandoned, that peace might someday be as institutionally important as war.

Franklin Roosevelt's Reorganization Dreams

In January 1937, Franklin Roosevelt proposed one of the most ambitious reorganizations of the executive branch in American history. Among his ideas: a Department of Social Welfare, a Department of Public Works, and renaming the Department of the Interior as the Department of Conservation.

Roosevelt's plans ran into fierce congressional opposition. Critics accused him of trying to accumulate too much power. The reorganization effort became tangled with his controversial court-packing scheme. By the time the political dust settled, most of Roosevelt's proposed departments had been shelved.

But his underlying vision—that the executive branch needed restructuring to handle the demands of modern government—proved influential. The welfare state that emerged from the New Deal did eventually require new organizational forms. It just took decades longer than Roosevelt hoped, and the structures that emerged looked different than he imagined.

Richard Nixon's Technocratic Vision

Richard Nixon, whatever his other failings, was genuinely interested in making government more efficient. He proposed multiple departmental reorganizations, including a Department of Human Resources (essentially a revamped Health, Education, and Welfare), a Department of Community Development (focused on rural infrastructure), and a Department of Economic Affairs that would have merged Commerce, Labor, and Agriculture.

None of these proposals passed. But Nixon did succeed in one major restructuring: creating the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. He established it as an independent agency rather than a full department, which meant it didn't require congressional approval for its creation. Sometimes the path of least resistance leads to lasting change.

Modern Proposals

Recent proposals tend to reflect contemporary concerns.

After the intelligence failures leading up to September 11th, former Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell proposed a Department of Intelligence that would consolidate the nation's various spy agencies under one cabinet secretary. Currently, intelligence is scattered across multiple agencies with different chains of command—the CIA reports to the president, the FBI is part of the Justice Department, military intelligence reports to the Pentagon. A Department of Intelligence would theoretically improve coordination. Critics worry it would concentrate too much secret power.

Andrew Yang, during his 2020 presidential campaign, proposed a Department of Technology. His argument: technology now shapes every aspect of American life, from employment to privacy to national security. Yet there's no cabinet-level advocate whose primary job is thinking about technological change. The issues get divided among Commerce, Defense, and various regulatory agencies, with no coherent strategy.

Senator Elizabeth Warren proposed a Department of Economic Development to replace the Commerce Department, absorbing the Small Business Administration, the Patent and Trademark Office, and various trade agencies. Her vision was a department focused explicitly on "creating and defending good American jobs" rather than the vaguer mission of promoting commerce generally.

President Trump proposed consolidating the Departments of Education and Labor into a single Department of Education and the Workforce, and renaming Health and Human Services as the Department of Health and Public Welfare. These proposals reflected a broader conservative argument that the executive branch has too many departments doing overlapping things.

The Quiet Power of Bureaucracy

It's easy to mock government bureaucracy. The jokes write themselves: endless forms, incomprehensible regulations, kafkaesque procedures for accomplishing simple tasks.

But there's something remarkable about the executive departments that often goes unnoticed.

Every day, without fanfare, they do an enormous amount of work. Social Security checks go out. Air traffic gets controlled. Food gets inspected. Veterans receive healthcare. Weather gets forecasted. Patents get reviewed. Borders get monitored. Diplomats negotiate. Scientists research. Parks get maintained.

The fifteen executive departments employ roughly two million civilian workers, not counting military personnel or contractors. They spend trillions of dollars annually. They touch the life of every American in ways both visible and invisible.

And they do this regardless of which party controls the White House. Presidents come and go. Secretaries are appointed and confirmed and eventually resign or get fired. But the career civil servants—the people who actually know how the systems work—remain. They provide continuity across administrations. They maintain institutional memory. They keep the machinery running.

This can be frustrating for presidents who want to implement dramatic changes. The bureaucracy has inertia. It resists sudden shifts in direction. It moves slowly, deliberately, sometimes maddeningly.

But this same inertia provides stability. No single election can destroy the executive branch's capacity to function. No single bad appointment can bring everything crashing down. The departments persist.

That persistence—boring, unglamorous, absolutely essential—is perhaps the greatest achievement of American public administration. Not the inspiring speeches or the dramatic legislation, but the quiet daily work of millions of people keeping a continental nation running.

The fifteen departments we have today aren't perfect. They're probably not even optimal. Future generations may reorganize them, consolidate some, create others. The proposals that failed in the past may yet succeed.

But for now, these fifteen bureaucracies—State, Treasury, Defense, Justice, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Energy, Education, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security—form the arms through which the American president reaches into the world.

Understanding them is understanding how American government actually works. Not the civics textbook version. Not the cable news version. The real thing, in all its complexity and compromise and quiet persistence.