Volume

of executive and administra. tive work

Extent of the civil service

CHAPTER XXI

THE CABINET AND THE EXECUTIVE CIVIL SERVICE

The work of legislation is of such character that in any government it can be, and usually is, attended to at a single place, and by a comparatively small group of men. Executive and administrative functions, on the other hand, must, by their very nature, be performed throughout the entire country, and they require large numbers of officials of widely varying titles, powers, and importance. In our national government the president is the chief executive, and upon him finally rests the whole burden of responsibility for the execution of the laws and for the performance of other duties, such as the conduct of foreign relations, which are commonly assimilated to executive work. But the president cannot personally execute the laws, or keep and disburse the public moneys, or manage the nation's postal service. There are no more hours in his day than in any other man's, and it is physically impossible for him to give attention to one-tenth part of the work that national officers must do, even within the bounds of a limited section of the country. He acts directly in matters of large moment; he appoints and removes certain officers; and, when circumstances require, he concerns himself laboriously with administrative details. But in the main he looks to his principal subordinates to keep the machinery of government in motion; and for months, and even years, at a time his relations with a given branch of administration may be purely nominal.

The executive civil service, which thus, under the president's supreme direction, carries on from day to day the work of the national government, has grown from a few hundred persons a century ago into a veritable army. On June 30, 1916,-before the great increase which resulted from the entrance of the United States into the World War-it totaled 480,327 officers and employees, and on June 30, 1921, when the special conditions of wartime had largely passed, the number was 597,482.1 How is this Thirty-eighth Annual Report of the U. S. Civil Service Commission (1921), At the date of the armistice (Nov. 11, 1918), the number was 917,760. The executive civil service, it should be noted, does not include the army, the

VII.

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XXI

great staff organized and controlled? How are its members ap- CHAP. pointed and removed? How is the government's work divided up among them for supervision and performance? To these matters we must now turn. In the present chapter the system as a whole will be outlined; in the succeeding one something will be said about the ten departments, considered individually.

features of the departments

A half-dozen features of the general scheme at once suggest General themselves as fundamental. (1) The national government, as we have seen,1 maintains its own full quota of officials and employees, only rarely and incidentally utilizing for its purposes the officials or employees of the states. This differs from the practice in some other federally-organized states, e.g., Switzerland, where local or divisional officers are extensively employed in the administration of national laws.2 (2) With some important exceptions, the executive and administrative activities of the government are gathered in main branches or divisions, known in most instances as "executive departments", which in every case have been established by act of Congress. The constitution does not set up departments, or say how many departments there shall be, or what they shall be called. It, however, plainly assumes that departments will exist it authorizes the president "to require the opinion, in writing, of the principal officer in each of the executive departments"; and it empowers Congress to vest the appointment of inferior officers in the heads of departments". Beginning with the departments of State, War, and Treasury, created in 1789, ten departments in all have thus far been established. There are numerous detached boards, commissions, and other agencies; none the less, there is a far greater amount of coördination and centralization than in the administrative systems of the states. (3) There is some overlapping of functions among the departments, and occasionally an official has to do with the work of more

navy, or the judicial establishment. Of the total number of employees in 1921, 78,865 were in the District of Columbia and 518,617 were in parts of the country outside the District.

1See p. 155.

Ogg, Governments of Europe (rev. ed.), 571. By a wide departure from precedent in this matter, the administration of the Selective Service Act of May 18, 1917, was entrusted to state and local officials. See E. H. Crowder, The Spirit of Selective Service (New York, 1920).

The complete list is: State (1789); War (1789); Treasury (1789); Navy (1798) Post Office (head admitted to cabinet in 1829); Interior (1849); Justice (1870); Agriculture (1889); Commerce (1903); Labor (1913). Departments of education, public health, and public welfare, among others, have often been proposed.

CHAP.
XXI

Considerations influ

selection
of depart-
ment heads

than one department. But, speaking broadly, each department is
separate from the others in both functions and personnel. (4) In
their internal organization the departments vary rather widely,
yet certain features regularly appear. In the first place, all are
organized under single heads. The constitution does not require
that this shall be so; although it is fair to assume that when the
framers wrote the provisions concerning department heads they
had individual officials, not boards or other groups, in mind.
Boards and commissions are employed in most of the detached
services, and are very commonly used in the state governments.
But every national department is presided over by a single official,
known in most instances as a secretary. Furthermore, practically
all of the departments have from one to four assistant secretaries
and a chief clerk. And the work is distributed among a number
of bureaus and divisions, usually with a single head variously
known as "commissioner,
"commissioner," "director," "comptroller," or "chief";
although the distribution is not always logical or permanent, and
the relation of bureau to division follows no clear principle. (5)
Heads of departments are directly and fully responsible to the
president. Congress can impose duties on them with which the
president cannot interfere, and it can remove them by impeach-
ment. But it is the president who is held principally responsible
for their official acts. Whatever is done by any one of them is con-
sidered as done by the president himself. He, very justly, has
almost complete freedom in appointing them; he directs their
activities; and he has unrestricted power to remove them. They
are answerable to him for all that they do in their official capacity,
being therefore in a wholly different position from that occupied
by department chiefs in England and other cabinet-governed
countries, who are responsible exclusively to the legislature.

As we shall see, the heads of departments occupy a dual posiencing the tion; they are at the same time chief administrators of their several branches of the government service and advisers to the president on questions of public policy, and, secondarily, on party matters. Speaking broadly, they are selected with both the administrative and the advisory functions in mind. Several other considerations, however, enter into the president's choice. First, the appointees must normally be of the president's party. Washington made Jefferson secretary of state and Hamilton secretary of the treasury. But friction arose, and it soon became expedient to bring the chief offices into the hands of men who stood closer

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status

together in political matters. Since 1795 the principle of party CHAP. solidarity has been closely followed. Cleveland indeed appointed to the position of secretary of state a man who had been consid- 1. Party ered as a Republican candidate for the presidency. But the appointee had supported Cleveland in the electoral campaign. Taft and Roosevelt each appointed a Democrat as secretary of war. But in both instances the appointee had not been prominent in national politics. The few exceptions merely prove the rule. This regard for party affiliation does not mean, however, that only party leaders are appointed. The earlier tendency to look upon the cabinet as a council of party leaders has practically disappeared. The appointees belong to the party in power at the White House; but, as a rule, half or more of them are not party leaders in any large sense of the term, and some have had no active part in politics whatever.2

grounds

Other practical considerations which more or less influence 2. Other the president's selection are geographical distribution and the representation of various wings or factions of the party. It will not do to take all of the cabinet officers from the East, or from the West, or from any single section of the country. Although President Wilson's first cabinet included members from eight different states, it was criticized in some quarters because-as was also true for a time during Roosevelt's presidency-three were residents of a single state, i.e., New York. Appointment of representatives of different elements in the president's party is designed, of course, to conciliate opposition and to promote solidarity. A good illustration is President Wilson's appointment of Mr. Bryan as secretary of state in 1913, with a view to winning for the administration the support of the more radical wing of the Democratic party. Still another powerful factor is personal friendship and favor. Every president takes into his official family men whom he knows but slightly. But he is likely to include also one or two men who, whatever other claims they may have, are first of all personal friends. President Jackson added to the political liveliness of his time by appointing his friend Major Eaton secretary of war; President Grant made his patron Walter Q. Gresham.

2 Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States, 75-76. On the other hand, of course, members are occasionally chosen mainly or solely because of their services as party leaders or officers. A single example is the selection of Mr. Will H. Hays for the postmaster-generalship by President Harding, whose campaign the appointee, as chairman of the Republican national committee, had managed.

СНАР.
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Functions of heads of departments:

1. Direc

tion

of early days, E. B. Washburne, secretary of state; Presidents Fillmore, Harrison, Cleveland, and McKinley found portfolios for their law partners; and President Roosevelt made several appointments in which the personal factor was prominent. All told, however, a steadily increasing proportion of cabinet officers are chosen for their administrative ability. Frequently they are men who have not been in politics, but have made names for themselves in the management of large professional or business interests. The secretary of the treasury is especially likely nowadays to be a man of this type. Perhaps three-fourths, on an average, have had previous experience in public office of some importance; about half have served in Congress, and a considerable number have been governors of states or ministers to foreign countries. Contrary to early practice, very few are now carried over from one administration to another, even when there is no change of the party in power.

Heads of departments exercise their functions both singly and collectively: singly, they are in charge of the several great branches of administration; collectively, they form the president's cabinet. Subject to the directing power of the president and to a certain amount of control by Congress, the department head, as such, directs and supervises the work of all bureaus, divisions, officers, and other agencies in the department under his care. He cannot personally watch the whole of it, but he must keep himself informed upon it, and must be at all times ready to assert his supe rior authority with a view to increased harmony and efficiency. In the second place, he exercises considerable control over the 2. Appoint personnel of his department. This he does mainly through the appointment of such inferior officers as Congress, under the familiar constitutional provision dealing with appointments,1 authorizes to be designated in this way. Many of the positions. thus arranged for are now on the merit basis, and this narrows the appointing officer's discretion. The power is, none the less, an important one; and it is reinforced by a somewhat restricted, yet substantial, power of removal.

ment and

removal

3. Issuing regulations

Another very important function is promulgation of regulations covering various aspects of the department's administrative work. The president, as we have seen, has an extensive ordinance power. But in many cases the administrative regulations issued by virtue of this power are prepared in the departments and issued 1 Art. II, § 2, cl. 2. * See p. 261.