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12.3: The Executive Branch

  • Page ID
    287407
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    Besides the president and vice president, the executive branch of the national government consists of millions of other civilian and military employees, making it the largest of the three branches in terms of personnel. The president manages this bureaucracy primarily through his Cabinet, which consists of the vice president and 15 heads of Cabinet departments. (See Figure 13.3 on page 148 for a list of Cabinet departments.)

    Cabinet department heads are chosen by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Each holds the title of Secretary (Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury, Secretary of Defense, and so on), except for the head of the Department of Justice, whose title is Attorney General. Cabinet secretaries advise the president on policy and implement presidential and congressional directives. The Department of Agriculture, for instance, distributes farm subsidies, provides food stamps to low-income families, and oversees the National School Lunch Program.

    The president’s Cabinet also makes up most of the presidential line of succession. If the president is unable to carry out his duties due to death, incapacitation, resignation, or removal from office, the vice president becomes president. If the vice president is unable to do so, the presidency passes to the Speaker of the House, then to the president pro tempore of the Senate (which is typically the longest-serving member of the majority party in the Senate). Next in line are the Cabinet officials in order of their departments’ creation, starting with the Secretary of State and ending with the Secretary of Homeland Security. The current line of succession after the vice president was established by Congress in 1947, but it has never been used. Nine vice presidents have ascended to the presidency upon a president’s death or resignation, but America has never needed to go further down the list.

    The presidency and vice presidency require their occupants to be natural-born U.S. citizens, but the other positions in the current presidential line of succession do not. During President Joe Biden’s administration, two Cabinet secretaries were not natural-born U.S. citizens. Had the United States been forced to proceed that far down the line of succession to find a new president, those secretaries would have been skipped over.

    The President also oversees 15 agencies grouped within the Executive Office of the President, including the Office of Management and Budget, the National Security Council, and the Council of Economic Advisers. Various independent agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, also fall under the president’s purview. The sheer number of departments and agencies under the president’s command reveals how much Americans expect out of their national government and how much those expectations have grown over time.


    12.3: The Executive Branch is shared under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.