Federal Government, Executive Branch

Federal Government, Executive Branch OverviewThe PresidencyDepartment of StateDepartment of DefenseDepartment of the TreasuryDepartment of AgricultureOther Departments
Overview The fear that drove the delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 was not the specter of monarchy but rather the anxiety created by a national Congress that was incapable of governing. For much of the convention, executive independence was threatened by a provision calling for election of the president by the legislature, but eventually the electoral college compromise took the selection out of the hands of the legislature and laid the basis for the president's claim to popular support. In addition, the decision to give the president the power to appoint executive officers provided a foundation for the cabinet system that would be developed by George Washington and used by all subsequent presidents.

Still, the potential for a popularly chosen and independent executive was not immediately realized. In the 1790s, supporters of executive independence became increasingly suspicious of popular opinion, and defenders of popular government were hostile to executive power. It was the Federalists who initially encouraged the growth of the executive branch, but Thomas Jefferson helped solidify its power. Although Jefferson saw a powerful executive as a threat to democracy, in founding the Democratic Republican party he established the role of president as a popular leader. Moreover, despite his distrust of executive power, he allowed for the continued expansion of the executive branch to handle the exigencies of government.

It was, however, Andrew Jackson who first embraced the idea of permanent political parties. Arguing that the president rather than Congress could best claim to represent the people, Jackson relied on that claim to defend extensive executive discretion. Jackson used the spoils system—giving federal jobs to one's political supporters—to tie the national government to the people through the party machinery and also to establish political control of the executive branch.

The Civil War proved a catalyst for further expansion of the executive branch. President Abraham Lincoln's exercise of emergency powers demonstrated the tremendous potential of an independent executive in time of war, a potential that would be exploited by presidents during the two world wars and the Cold War. Presidents from Lincoln to Woodrow Wilson saw the spoils system become a major threat to executive independence and energy. While civil service reform in part arose from reformers' desire to clean up the corruption of the spoils system, presidential support for the reform was also motivated by the same goal that had moved Jackson to adopt the spoils system in the first place: increased control over the executive branch.

Since President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s, presidents have sought greater control of an executive branch that grew from 239,476 civilian employees in 1901 to 2,482,666 in 1951. Twentieth‐century presidents also relied on popular leadership skills to enhance their power. Theodore Roosevelt's concept of a “bully pulpit” and FDR's “fireside chats” because the models for other great communicators such as John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, who used the new medium of television very effectively. The increased reliance on popular leadership, however, weakened the president's ties to political parties and to Congress. Personal popularity proved an unreliable foundation for presidents from Lyndon B. Johnson through Jimmy Carter. Whether the 1998–1999 impeachment of Bill Clinton represented another blow to the popular presidency of the twentieth century or whether Clinton's ability to withstand the impeachment marked the beginning of a period of renewed strength for the office remained uncertain as the twentieth century ended.
See also Constitution; Democratic Party; Federalist Party; Republican Party; Republicanism; Veto Power; Whig Party.

Bibliography

Sidney M. Milkis and and Michael Nelson , The American Presidency: Origins and Development, 2d ed., 1994.
Stephen Skowronek , The Politics Presidents Make, 2d ed., 1997.

David K. Nicholas

The Presidency The American presidency, the world's oldest continuous republican chief executive office, is the choicest prize in the nation's political system. It stands at the apex of national and international attention and power. When the framers of the Constitution introduced Article II with the words, “The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America,” the word “president” was readily acceptable to the public, having been the title of the presiding officer of the Continental Congress.

The office combines the political and symbolic functions that are ordinarily divided in other countries, so that the president is both chief of state and head of government. The executive function of the office, namely to see that the nation's laws are faithfully carried out, has expanded over the course of two centuries to include vast legislative, judicial, administrative, economic, and diplomatic responsibilities. The president serves also as the commander‐in‐chief of the armed forces. Since the early twentieth century, presidents have also functioned as the head of their parties, dispensing patronage and shaping party programs. In 1940 Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the Executive Office of the President to bring executive‐branch activities under tighter control. Its many subunits, staffed by about five hundred people by the 1990s, schedule the president's (and the first lady's) activities, deal with the media, and generally manage the far‐flung activities of the office, including everything from advising on economics, scientific, and technological developments and maintaining cabinet records to drug control and safeguarding the codes for deploying nuclear weapons.

Shaping the Presidency in the Early Republic and Beyond.

The shaping of the presidency was a troubling issue at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Some of the delegates favored a plural executive, but James Wilson (1742–1798), a Scottish‐born Pennsylvania lawyer and political theorist who deserves to be regarded as the father of the presidency, adamantly argued that only a single executive could give the necessary “energy, dispatch and responsibility to the office”. Wilson also insisted that the office be independent of the legislature, have a veto power, and control foreign relations. He also pressed for the direct popular election of the chief executive—a novel idea at the time that continues to win advocates. Late in the Convention, a committee appointed to find an appropriate alternate solution invented a system of electors. Each state would have as many electors as the total number of its representatives and senators, to be chosen by any method on which the state legislature decided. Collectively known as the electoral college, the arrangement plainly gave an advantage to the large states. Still, it was assumed that in many elections no aspirant would win the required electoral‐college majority, and that the election would be thrown into the House of Representatives, which would choose the president from the top five (later changed to three) names, with each state having one vote. In fact, only in 1800, 1824, and 1876 were presidential elections decided by the House. Despite the complexity of the electoral‐college arrangement, the selection of the president almost from the beginning has been regarded as the equivalent of a popular election. Nevertheless, in the elections of 1876 and 1888, the candidates who polled the most popular votes failed to win the presidency in the electoral college.

The presidential term was fixed at four years almost as an afterthought, with no limit on reelection. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison retired after two terms, establishing a precedent that stood until Franklin D. Roosevelt won a third term in 1940 and a fourth in 1944, although Ulysses S. Grant in 1880 and Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 had sought third terms. The Twenty‐second Amendment (1951), in a kind of posthumous rebuke to FDR, limited presidents constitutionally to two terms. Other amendments have also modified the original presidency: The Twelfth (1804) required the electoral college to vote separately for president and vice president to avoid the confusion that marred the election of 1800; the Nineteenth (1919) altered the voter base by granting the ballot to women and the Twenty‐sixth (1971) altered it further by enfranchising eighteen‐year olds; the Twentieth (1933) moved inauguration day from 4 March to 20 January; the Twenty‐third (1961) gave electoral votes to the District of Columbia; the Twenty‐fourth (1964) forbade the imposition of a poll tax on voters in presidential elections; and the Twenty‐fifth (1967), in the aftermath of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's major illnesses while in office, set forth procedures to be followed in case of presidential disability. The recurring idea of a single fixed presidential term is of long standing. Andrew Jackson in his State of the Union messages repeatedly called for a single, six‐year term.

The strong presidency provided for in the Constitution owed much to the expectation that George Washington would inaugurate the office. One delegate wrote, “I do [not] believe the [executive powers] would be so great had not many of the members cast their eyes toward General Washington as President; and shaped their Ideas of the Powers to be given a President, by their opinions of his Virtues”. Washington, keenly aware that he was the first national president in history, knew that he would be setting precedents by almost everything he did, including choosing the heads of the executive departments—then state, treasury, war, and attorney general—and making of them a cabinet, an extraconstitutional institution. On formal occasions he received guests while standing on a raised platform and wearing a sword, and did not shake hands during his time in office. Still, neither he nor the American people desired a monarchy. After considerable discussion in Congress and elsewhere as to how to address him, including one suggestion that he be called “His Highness the President of the United States of America and Protector of their Liberties,” the simple phrase “President of the United States” was deemed sufficient. When Washington left office in 1797, he created the matchless tradition that an elected executive departs on schedule, and all of his successors have followed suit, so that the fact seems ordinary when in fact it is extraordinary. As his successor, John Adams, wrote to his wife on his inauguration day, “The sight of the sun setting and another rising (though less splendid) was a novelty”.

The third president, Thomas Jefferson, although a slaveholder, brought to the office a democratic manner that seemed better befitting to a republic. He walked to his inauguration, shook hands freely, and forbade presidential birthday celebrations. In greeting people at the newly completed “President's House” (later called the White House), he took no account of differences in rank or prestige. His style, with many additions and variations, in time became the norm of presidential behavior. Democratization and responsiveness to public opinion constantly brought the chief executive closer to the public: Andrew Jackson was the first “man of the people,” winning a national constituency with supporters in every section of the country; Abraham Lincoln was metamorphosed in affectionate parlance from “Honest Abe,” when he was the Republican candidate, to “Father Abraham,” when he became the embattled Union's war leader; and Theodore Roosevelt came to be “Teddy”—a nickname immortalized in the Teddy Bear. Franklin D. Roosevelt entered America's homes via radio “fireside chats”. Dwight D. Eisenhower in the same spirit allowed his news conferences to be televised; James Earl Carter made himself officially Jimmy Carter; William Jefferson Clinton, known everywhere as Bill Clinton, opened the White House e‐mail address to the public. In the later twentieth century, however, the tight security imposed by the U.S. Secret Service (a division of the Treasury Department), the trappings of what some called “the imperial presidency,” symbolized by the giant presidential jet, Air Force One, and the vast entourage accompanying the president on every trip, tended to make these populist gestures more a matter of public relations than of participatory democracy.

The Presidency and Party Politics.

Until 1824, presidential and vice presidential nominees were selected by congressional leaders meeting in secret—later public—sessions called caucuses. Attacked as undemocratic, “King Caucus” was replaced by national nominating conventions, introduced by the Anti‐Masonic party in 1831 and adopted by the two major parties in 1836. Now meeting quadrennially in the summertime, the conventions of the Democratic and Republican parties, consisting of 1,100 to 1,800 delegates chosen at the state level by primary elections, convention, or committees, nominate their candidates by majority vote. Until 1936, however, the Democratic party required a two‐thirds majority. Thus it took the Democrats 46 ballots to nominate Woodrow Wilson in 1912 and 103 ballots to agree upon John W. Davis in 1924. Not since 1952, however, has a major party proceeded past the first ballot to select a candidate, and the television networks no longer offer gavel‐to‐gavel coverage of the extravaganzas.

The parties have ranged widely in their selection of presidential nominees: from governors and former governors (the Democrats' Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and 1956, and the Republicans' Ronald Reagan in 1980 and George W. Bush in 2000) to war heroes (the Whig party's William Henry Harrison in 1840 and Zachary Taylor in 1848, and the Republicans' Ulysses S. Grant in 1868 and Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952) and the Senate (the Republicans' Warren G. Harding in 1920 and the Democrats' John F. Kennedy in 1960).

As presidential election campaigns moved to the center of national political attention, they became filled with hoopla that included catchy songs and slogans, parades with marching bands, election eve bonfires, and cruising sound trucks. Some rallying cries are embedded in the national memory: Tippecanoe and Tyler Too (1840), The Full Dinner Pail (1900), He Kept Us Out of War (1916), Keep Cool with Coolidge (1924), No Third Term (1940), I Like Ike (1952), and Nixon's the One (1972). When the twenty‐first century dawned, there was growing public concern over the astronomical cost of presidential campaigns, the methods used to raise the required money, and the role of attack ads and superficial sound bites in television‐dominated campaigns.

Presidential Succession; Impeachment; First Ladies.

Eight vice presidents have succeeded to the presidency upon the death or assassination of the president: John Tyler (1841), Millard Fillmore (1850), Andrew Johnson (1865), Chester A. Arthur (1881), Theodore Roosevelt (1901), Calvin Coolidge (1923), Harry S. Truman (1945), and Lyndon B. Johnson (1963). When Richard M. Nixon resigned in the wake of the Watergate scandal—the first resignation in the history of the office—he was succeeded by Gerald Ford (1974). Ford in 1973 in accordance with the Twenty‐fifth Amendment had been named by President Nixon—and confirmed by Congress— to succeed Vice‐president Spiro T. Agnew who had been forced to resign amidst bribery and tax‐evasion charges. Ford, as president, selected Nelson A. Rockefeller to be vice president, giving the nation for the first time not only a president but also a vice president who were not elected. The line of succession to the presidency after the vice president was established by law in 1947: the Speaker of the House, the president pro tem of the Senate, and the members of the cabinet in order of the creation of their department, beginning with the secretary of state. Under the constitutional provision for the removal of presidents, vice presidents, and other ranking federal officers by impeachment and trial, Andrew Johnson (1868) and Bill Clinton (1999) were impeached by the House of Representative for “high crimes and misdemeanors” but found not guilty by the Senate.

The role of the president's wife—the designation “First Lady” was not used until the Civil War era—has sometimes made the presidency seem like a two‐person position. Among the best‐known spouses have been Martha Dandridge Custis Washington, an involved helpmate of the General; Dolley Payne Madison, who served as Jefferson's hostess in the White House and subsequently her husband's as well; Sarah Childress Polk, whose political savvy was legendary; Edith Galt Wilson, the president's second wife, who jealously guarded his privacy and even took over some of his duties after he was incapacitated by a stroke in October 1919, so that she is sometimes regarded as the “first woman president;” Eleanor Roosevelt, whose constant travels made her FDR's “eyes and ears”; Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, whose grace and charm made her a national icon; Rosalynn Smith Carter, who sat in cabinet meetings and conducted diplomacy unofficially for the president; Nancy Davis Reagan, who was a dominant political force in the Reagan White House; and Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose powerful place in her husband's administration appeared to fulfill Clinton's campaign assertion that his election would give the nation “two‐for‐one” and in 2000 won election to the U.S. Senate from New York.
See also Federal Government, Legislative Branch: House of Representatives; Federal Government, Legislative Branch: Senate; Political Parties; Washington, D.C.; and entries on individual presidents.]

Bibliography

William Seale , The President's House, 2 vols., 1986.
Stephen Hess , Organizing the Presidency, 2d ed., 1988.
Richard E. Neustadt , Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan, 4th ed., 1990.
William DeGregorio , The Complete Book of U.S. Presidents: From George Washington to Bill Clinton, rev. ed. 1993.
Leonard W. Levy and Louis Fisher, eds., Encyclopedia of the American Presidency, 4 vols, 1994.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., et al., eds. Running for President: The Candidates and Their Images, 2 vols., 1994.
Henry F. Graff, ed., The Presidents: A Reference History, 2d ed., 1996.
Richard Pious , The Presidency, 1996.
Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., Philip B. Kunhardt III, and Peter W. Kunhardt, eds, The American President, 1999.

Henry F. Graff

Department of State The State Department began as something of an institutional anomaly. It was patterned on the British government's secretary of state for foreign affairs, but had no counterpart comparable to the British secretary for domestic affairs. The department's early history reflected the revolutionary generation's ambivalent attitude toward formal diplomacy. Only with great reluctance had the Continental Congress created a professional diplomatic corps. This meager political backing translated into a weak support structure for the conduct of early American foreign policy. Poor communication between Secretary of State James Monroe and U.S. diplomats in London helped bring on the War of 1812. Monroe's successor at the State Department, John Quincy Adams, lacking a clerical staff, had to transcribe three copies of the Adams‐Onís Treaty himself. Later, Adams's uncertainty over whether to recognize Brazil was complicated by the fact that no one in his employ could translate Portuguese.

If ill‐equipped to handle foreign relations, the State Department from the first became enmeshed in partisan politics, with the wars of the French Revolutionary Era providing an early flashpoint. While the first secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, favored the French, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton advocated a pro‐British neutrality. Hamilton's triumph in this dispute helped give rise to the first party system while also anticipating the department's later struggles to control foreign policy. As revolutionary passions faded, the department evolved into something of an incubator for presidents. Three successive secretaries of states— James Madison, James Monroe, and John Quincy Adams—rose to the presidency.

While Adams's appointment of the westerner Henry Clay as secretary of state in 1825 marked the end of the first cycle of American diplomacy, the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828 began an interval in which the State Department was weaker than at perhaps any other time in U.S. history. It also suffered appalling organizational deficiencies. During a diplomatic crisis with Peru in the early 1850s, for example, departmental staff took several months to find a crucial memorandum documenting an agreement Secretary of State Daniel Webster had reached with the Peruvians over offshore island guano rights.

Abraham Lincoln's appointment of William Seward as secretary of state in 1861 helped resolve these related problems of inefficiency and low prestige. Seward initiated an efficient indexing system, regional responsibilities for staff members, and the publication of diplomatic documents in the Foreign Relations of the United States series. Appointing a talented diplomatic corps, Seward pursued a risky but successful strategy of preventing European intervention in the Civil War. Seward's tenure, however, also saw the emergence of a pattern of congressional thwarting of State Department initiatives. Congress stymied Seward's attempts to purchase the Danish West Indies and the efforts of his successor, Hamilton Fish (1869–1877), to annex the Dominican Republic.

The State Department, meanwhile, had developed a two‐tier culture in which the consular service endured low pay and poor working conditions while top diplomats were appointed for patronage reasons or their social connections. With 80 percent of secretaries of state having served in Europe and most still coming from privileged backgrounds, the department became an inviting target for congressional critics who denounced its “elitism” and demanded less exclusionary recruitment policies. Their crusade culminated in the Rogers Act of 1924, which established a professional foreign service with improved pay, retirement benefits, and tenure provisions, while combining the diplomatic and consular services.

On substantive foreign‐policy issues, secretaries of state James G. Blaine (1881, 1889–1892), John Hay (1898–1905), and Elihu Root (1905–1909) skillfully promoted the nation's turn‐of‐the‐century emergence as a world power. President Woodrow Wilson pleased the Democratic party's agrarian wing by appointing William Jennings Bryan as secretary of state in 1913, but the pacifist Bryan, unhappy over the belligerence of Wilson's protests of German U‐boat attacks, resigned in 1915. His successor Robert Lansing proved ineffectual as Wilson, advised by Colonel Edward M. House, essentially acted as his own secretary of state, an approach taken by other strong presidents as well.

Despite congressional criticism, the State Department regained prestige in the 1920s under Charles Evans Hughes, Frank Kellogg, and Henry Stimson, one of the nation's most prescient diplomats. But the freewheeling presidential style of Franklin Delano Roosevelt again lessened the department's influence, even as Cordell Hull became the longest serving secretary of state in American history (1933–1944) and the number of State Department personnel swelled from under two thousand in 1940 to more than sixteen thousand by 1950.

The lawyer and career diplomat Dean Acheson, secretary of state from 1949 to 1953, played a major role in shaping America's Cold War policy—a policy built upon the containment doctrine proposed in 1946 by George Kennan, a U.S. diplomat in Moscow who later headed the State Department's policy planning staff. President Dwight D. Eisenhower's first secretary of state, John Foster Dulles (1953–1959), also played a strong role in building anti‐Soviet Cold War alliances. But the department faced problems as well. Accusations of disloyalty against State Department officials, including Acheson and the respected George Marshall (secretary of state from 1947 to 1949), leveled by Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy and others, demoralized departmental personnel. Meanwhile, the department's policy‐making role was challenged by such newly created entities as the Department of Defense, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Council, and the National Security Advisor. Indeed, during the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, each of these agencies exerted more influence than did the State Department under Dean Rusk (1961–1969). The department's foreign‐policy primacy was also threatened by such new bodies as the Agency for International Development and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Henry Kissinger exerted great influence as President Richard M. Nixon's national security advisor before himself becoming secretary of state in 1973.

In the post–Cold War era, the State Department again became a target of congressional criticism, this time from nationalists who saw it as a hotbed of Wilsonian interventionism. This period also brought a significant historical breakthrough with President Bill Clinton's appointment of the first woman secretary of state, Madeleine K. Albright, in 1997.
See also Anticommunism; Clayton‐Bulwer Treaty; Collective Security; Dollar Diplomacy; Eisenhower Doctrine; Expansionism; Federal Government, Legislative Branch: Senate; Foreign Aid; Fourteen Points; Good Neighbor Policy; Internationalism; Jay's Treaty; Kellogg‐Briand Pact; Marshall Plan; Monroe Doctrine; “Open Door” Policy; Pan American Union; Pinckney's Treaty; Truman Doctrine; Webster‐Ashburton Treaty; Yalta Conference.

Bibliography

Samuel Flagg Bemis, ed., American Secretaries of State and Their Diplomacy, 10 vols., 1963.
Waldo Henrichs , American Ambassador: Joseph Grew and the Development of the United States Diplomatic Tradition, 1966.
Smith Simpson , Anatomy of the State Department, 1967.
Hugh De Santis , Diplomacy of Silence: The American Foreign Service, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War, 1933–1947, 1980.

Robert David Johnson

Department of Defense The Department of Defense, established in 1949, evolved from the National Military Establishment (NME), a hybrid organization created by Congress in 1947 to unify the previously separate War and Navy departments, dating from 1781 and 1798 respectively. Unification had its immediate origins in the experiences of World War II, which demonstrated the need for new organizational mechanisms to achieve more effective military coordination. As the war ended, attention turned to enacting permanent reforms. One plan, sponsored by the War Department and endorsed by President Harry S. Truman, called for a highly centralized defense organization, including a separate air force, under a single secretary of defense. A competing plan, advocated by the navy, urged closer coordination rather than outright unification.

The resulting legislative compromise under the National Security Act of 1947 borrowed from both plans. Desiring the savings and increased efficiency promised by unification but fearing that an overly centralized system would produce a “Prussian‐style general staff,” Congress therefore incorporated aspects of the navy concept by loosely unifying the services under the NME and granting the secretary of defense only qualified authority. Additionally, the 1947 act gave statutory standing to the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), a body that had existed without a formal charter since 1942, and established two new organizations: the National Security Council to oversee high‐level policy coordination and the Central Intelligence Agency to collect and analyze intelligence.

The first secretary of defense, James V. Forrestal (1947–1949), took office on 17 September 1947. As secretary of the navy during the unification debate, Forrestal had opposed service unification. Once installed in his new job he adopted a go‐slow approach—“evolution, not revolution”—toward integrating service activities. Even so, he did not receive what he considered sufficient cooperation from the military services. Especially intense was interservice competition over roles and missions. Meanwhile, worsening relations with the Soviet Union intensified pressures to step up military preparedness, despite rigid budget ceilings imposed by President Truman for economic reasons.

Doing an about‐face, Forrestal recommended that the secretary's powers and staff support be strengthened. In 1949 Congress removed the limitations on the secretary's authority and converted the NME into the Department of Defense, a full‐scale executive department. With unencumbered powers and a larger staff, the secretary of defense became the focal point of an increasingly centralized administrative system. During the summer and fall of 1949, opponents of unification fought back, as senior navy officers, reeling from recent budget cuts, openly attacked service unification for causing a shift away from sea power toward growing reliance on strategic nuclear bombing as the country's first line of defense. But following the across‐the‐board rearmament precipitated by the Korean War, money for defense became more plentiful and the stresses and strains of interservice relations eased.

The Korean War produced renewed complaints from Congress that the services continued to squander resources while unnecessarily duplicating activities. In 1953 and 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower addressed these problems through organizational reforms that took the unification process nearly as far as it could go without abandoning the concept of individual military services. In the Defense Reorganization Act of 1958, Congress authorized the secretary to reassign service functions and approved a new chain of command that bypassed the service secretaries. Instead of being separately administered, as in the past, the military departments were merely to be “separately organized,” a gesture toward preserving service autonomy but a distinct departure from the preunification days when the departments had operated as sovereign entities.

The first secretary of defense to make full use of these increased powers was Robert S. McNamara (1961–1968). His initial task was to fulfill President John F. Kennedy's campaign promise to replace Eisenhower's New Look defense strategy, which had emphasized nuclear weapons, with a “flexible response” posture giving greater weight to general purpose forces. To control rising defense costs, McNamara introduced a variety of reforms, including mission‐oriented budgeting with five‐year expenditure projections, “systems analysis” techniques that used computer models to evaluate the cost‐effectiveness of weapons and programs, and consolidation of service activities under defensewide agencies. The net effect was an unprecedented degree of centralized civilian control.

McNamara's management successes contrasted sharply with the military debacle that developed in Southeast Asia during his tenure. Secretaries of defense had customarily stayed out of the operational side of military affairs, leaving them to the professionals, but McNamara inserted himself directly into the details of running the Vietnam War. Initially a strong proponent of American involvement in Vietnam, he gradually became disillusioned and left office counseling stepped‐up negotiations and disengagement.

After McNamara came a reaction to centralized authority. While the managerial and budgeting techniques he had pioneered generally survived, his use of civilians in roles traditionally reserved for military professionals aroused much resentment among the services and skepticism in Congress. By the mid‐1980s, the question at issue was how to revitalize the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose stature and effectiveness had diminished steadily since Vietnam. The Goldwater‐Nichols Act of 1986 attempted to reverse this trend by giving the JCS chairman broader advisory powers and increased administrative authority over the Joint Staff (the JCS bureaucracy), and by mandating more “jointness” among the services. Although the performance of U.S. forces in the 1991 Persian Gulf War seemed to bear out the soundness of the new emphasis on joint doctrine, subsequent misadventures in Somalia and command‐and‐control problems in the Middle East suggested a need for further refinements.

During the 1990s the Department of Defense faced the challenge of an international environment that, while no longer dominated by the threat of a global thermonuclear war, continued to exhibit unstable tendencies. At the same time, a revolution in military affairs, driven largely by new technologies, augured major changes in the role and composition of future military forces. In the circumstances, the demands on the secretary of defense and the JCS chairman to work together in providing unified policy and programmatic guidance appeared unlikely to diminish. Unification, born of necessity after World War II, had become a fact of life throughout the defense establishment.
See also Cold War; Military, The; Nuclear Strategy; Post–Cold War Era.

Bibliography

Steven L. Rearden , History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense: The Formative Years, 1947–1950, 1984.
Robert J. Art, Vincent Davis, and Samuel P. Huntington, eds., Reorganizing America's Defense, 1985.
Doris M. Condit , History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense: The Test of War, 1950–1953, 1988.
James A. Blackwell Jr. and Barry M. Blechman, eds., Making Defense Reform Work, 1990.
Roger Trask and and Alfred Goldberg , The Department of Defense, 1947–1997, 1997.
Robert J. Watson , History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense: Into the Missile Age, 1956–1961, 1997.

Steven L. Rearden

Department of Justice The Judiciary Act of 1789 established the U.S. attorney general's office as one of the earliest and most prominent within the executive branch. As the nation's chief legal officer, the attorney general joined the secretaries of Treasury, State, and War as a member of the cabinet. Yet President George Washington's attorney general, Edmund Randolph, was assisted by only one clerk. Not until 1870 did Congress establish a Department of Justice headed by the attorney general. The new department was given responsibility for representing the U.S. government in all federal courts, providing legal advice to the White House and other executive agencies, prosecuting violations of federal law, and protecting the country from subversion.

During its early history, Justice primarily enforced antitrust legislation, prosecuted tax evasion cases, and monitored so‐called “subversives” and “public enemies”. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was established in 1908 as the department's chief investigative arm. The department gained notoriety during the post–World War I Red Scare when Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer mobilized a vast campaign against radicals allegedly planning “to rise up and destroy the Government at one fell swoop”. Working with local law enforcement officials, Palmer coordinated massive dragnet raids in 1919 and 1920 that targeted members of socialist or communist organizations, especially alien members. Not surprisingly, Congress placed the Immigration and Naturalization Service within Justice in 1940.

Sweeping civil rights reforms in the 1960s and after expanded the department's mission and functions dramatically. In particular, the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division was given responsibility for prosecuting violations of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the Equal Educational Opportunitities Act of 1974, and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

The post‐1960 Justice Department also played a major role in presidential efforts to launch a “war on crime”. Whereas President Lyndon B. Johnson's attorney general, Ramsey Clark, championed civil rights and due process, his successor John N. Mitchell embraced the Richard M. Nixon administration's call for “law and order”. As Mitchell insisted, Justice “was an institution for law enforcement, not social improvement”. Ironically, Mitchell himself was convicted in 1975 of conspiracy and obstruction of justice in the Watergate scandal. In the Clinton administration, Attorney General Janet Reno made Justice a key participant in debates over the 1994 crime bill and oversaw such varied departmental responsibilities as investigating violations of federal law, regulating immigration, policing narcotics trafficking, guarding domestic security from subversive attacks, assisting local law enforcement, providing legal advice to executive officials, and trying all government litigation before federal courts.

The Justice Department has long been authorized to name special prosecutors to investigate wrongdoing by executive branch officials. During the Nixon administration, for example, Archibald Cox was appointed to spearhead the Watergate investigation. Yet Cox's summary discharge for pursuing incriminating White House tapes highlighted dramatic limitations in how executive officials were policed. The Ethics in Government Act of 1978 established the office of independent counsel as well as formal procedures by which the Attorney General is required to initiate independent investigations of high‐level executive officials for malfeasance. Since then, various White House challenges to the independent counsel's broad discretion over witness selection, investigatory strategies, and indictment decisions have routinely failed in the federal courts. The independent‐counsel process thus has generated fierce debate and considerable fine‐tuning whenever the law has required congressional reauthorization. This was especially true of the 1999 reauthorization which followed the controversial investigation of President Clinton by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr.

The Department of Justice became embroiled in controversy under Attorney General John Ashcroft, a deeply conservative former Missouri senator named to the post in 2001 by President George W. Bush. Forty‐two senators voted against the nomination, but it narrowly carried. Ashcroft took a hard line on criminal-justice issues, pressing for tougher sentencing guidelines and strongly supporting the death penalty, for example. Under Ashcroft, the Justice Department opposed a series of gun‐control measures as infringements of the Second Amendment and spent millions on an anti‐pornography campaign. (To further protect the public's morals, the department covered in blue drapery a partially nude female statue representing “Justice” that appeared behind Ashcroft in his early televised news conferences.) Ashcroft's vigorous enforcement of the USA Patriot Act, passed in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, led to accusations that the Justice Department was jeopardizing the civil liberties of American citizens. In 2004 Ashcroft faced heavy criticism from a blue‐ribbon national panel investigating the 9/11 attacks for failing to make anti‐terrorism a top Justice Department priority earlier in 2001 despite urgent warnings from the Federal Bureau of Investigation of an imminent domestic attack.

Bibliography

Daniel J. Tichenor
Mary L. Hinsdale , A History of the President's Cabinet, 1911.
Henry Barrett Learned , The President's Cabinet: Studies in the Origin, Formation, and Structure of an American Institution, 1912.
Richard Fenno , The President's Cabinet, 1959.
Bradley H. Patterson Jr. , The President's Cabinet: Issues and Questions, 1976.
John P. Burke , The Institutional Presidency, 1992.
W. Craig Bledsoe and and Leslie Rigby , The Cabinet and Executive Departments, in Cabinets and Counselors: The President and the Executive Branch, 1997, pp. 73–140.
Ronald C. Moe , The President's Cabinet, in Understanding the Presidency, eds. James P. Pfiffner and Roger H. Davidson, 1997, pp. 136–55.

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Paul S. Boyer

Department of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the treasury, said that most of the important measures of the government are connected with the Treasury Department. That remained as true at the end of the twentieth century as it was in Hamilton's time. From its Revolutionary War beginnings to the present, the Department of the Treasury has played a key role in the nation's development. The secretary of the treasury is the president's senior economic adviser and supervises the operation of a vast executive department that has served the nation with distinction since 1789.

The demands of effective financial administration forced the Continental Congress and then the U.S. Congress to overcome their misgivings about delegating the power of the purse. Accordingly, on 2 September 1789, Congress created the Treasury Department under the direction of a secretary, to be aided by a Comptroller (the superintendent of accounts), an Auditor (the certifier of accounts), a Register (the keeper of accounts), a Treasurer (in charge of receiving and disbursing funds), and a general assistant.

On 11 September 1789, Alexander Hamilton began his tenure as secretary and instituted an economic program that included proposals for funding the nation's debt, establishing a central bank, augmenting internal revenues, and promoting domestic industry. Hamilton's program, which envisioned an urban‐based, manufacturing economy, proved controversial, as did his penchant for wielding his power over the budgets of other government departments to influence their policies.

Hamilton's successor, Albert Gallatin—the longest serving secretary (1801–1813) in Treasury history—was an active crusader for government economy, which brought him into constant conflict with other department heads. (Treasury's control over government estimates and expenditures under Hamilton and Gallatin anticipated the function of today's Office of Management and Budget.) Thanks largely to Gallatin's economies, Treasury employed fewer people in 1826 than in 1801. Customs duties and land sales generated sufficient revenue to retire the national debt by 1834 and, in most years before the Civil War, to generate a surplus that was refunded to the states. A growing national economy and a budget‐minded government combined to make possible the elimination of excise taxes on products like whiskey and jewelry, as well as the Treasury machinery to collect those taxes.

From the beginning, the Treasury Department spawned myriad subsidiary agencies and functions. The Post Office Department, originally under Treasury supervision, gained autonomy in 1829; the General Land Office left Treasury to become part of the new Interior Department in 1849. At one time or another, the Public Health Service, the Bureau of Narcotics, and the Supervisory Architect of the United States operated under Treasury's umbrella.

Treasury has always functioned as the collector of customs duties. From the fleet of ten small ships authorized by Hamilton to enforce the customs laws evolved the U.S. Coast Guard, the oldest seagoing branch of the military, whose functions were transferred to the Department of Transportation in 1967.

The National Currency Act of 1863, designed to end the chaos associated with the distribution of private bank notes and to help finance the Civil War, created an Office of the Comptroller of the Currency within the Department of the Treasury to administer a system of national banks authorized to distribute a uniform national currency, nicknamed greenbacks. (Treasury relinquished most of its monetary responsibilities to the newly created Federal Reserve System in 1913.) The U.S. Secret Service, protector of the president and vice president and their families, is a division of the Department of the Treasury. It was initially established in 1865 to prevent counterfeiting of greenbacks. Until the creation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935, the Secret Service was the government's principal general law enforcement agency.

The financial pressures of the Civil War led to a sweeping taxation program, including the first federal income tax, administered by a Commissioner of Internal Revenue under the secretary of the treasury. Many these taxes lapsed after the war, including the income tax, but the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution (1913) authorizing a federal income tax brought the Internal Revenue Service back to life. Enforcement of the 1919 Volstead Act, prohibiting the sale of alcoholic beverages, also fell to Treasury. The unit created to combat liquor trafficking eventually evolved into the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

The Great Depression caused hundreds of banks to fail and in 1933 led newly inaugurated President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to declare a bank holiday to stop the panic. Treasury then supervised the reopening of the solvent banks and the orderly liquidation or reorganization of the others.

U.S. involvement in both World War I and World War II was partly financed by the sale of government bonds under Treasury supervision. The Defense Bond campaigns of World War II, modeled on the Liberty Bond drives of World War I, raised $211 billion, or about two‐thirds of the war's cost. (U.S. savings bonds, administered by the Treasury Department's Bureau of Public Debt, are a direct offshoot of the wartime bond program.) A little known but influential function of Treasury during both wars was the implementation of freeze orders on enemy assets under the 1917 Trading With the Enemy Act.

After the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference established a new international monetary system, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. (1891–1967) was named chairman of the Board of Governors of both the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the World Bank) and the International Monetary Fund. In 1959, Treasury spearheaded the creation of the Inter‐American Development Bank to promote economic development in Latin America.

In the later twentieth century, Treasury assisted a succession of presidential administrations in fighting inflation, unemployment, negative trade balances, and a rising federal deficit. The department responded to the savings and loan crisis of the mid‐1980s by overseeing the creation of the Office of Thrift Supervision to monitor the savings and loan industry more closely. In the early 1990s, Treasury played an important role in the negotiations that led to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The economic expansion of the later 1990s and the decline in the budget deficit resulted in part from the Department's policies.
See also Bank of the United States, First and Second; Banking and Finance; Business Cycle; Depressions, Economic; Early Republic, Era of the; Eighteenth Amendment; Foreign Trade; Monetary Policy, Federal; New Deal Era, The; Savings and Loan Debacle; Tariffs; Temperance and Prohibition.

Bibliography

Esther Rogoff Taus , Central Banking Functions of the United States Treasury, 1943.
Leonard D. White , The Federalists: A Study in Administrative History, 1965.
Office of Information, Department of the Treasury , The Department of the Treasury, 1969.
Bernard S. Katz and C. Daniel Vencill, eds., Biographical Dictionary of United States Secretaries of the Treasury, 1996.

Jesse Stiller

Department of Agriculture The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) was established in 1862. The first commissioner of agriculture, Isaac Newton, organized the department by scientific fields such as entomology and botany, each represented initially by one person and later by a division. Early contact with farmers was limited to the distribution of seeds for trial and the publication of advisory pamphlets. The USDA began with a small budget and an uncertain relationship to the land‐grant universities in the development of agricultural science. In 1887 the Hatch Act established state agricultural experimental stations as institutions for basic research in agriculture‐related fields.

In the late nineteenth century the USDA began reorganizing its research activities to focus on specific problems, such as livestock diseases. The first new unit was the Bureau of Animal Industry, created in 1884. With permanent status and funding, an approving interest group (cattle ranchers in this case), and regulatory power, this new bureau made rapid progress against livestock diseases and became the model for other problem‐oriented bureaus. Harvey W. Wiley, head of the Bureau of Chemistry from 1883 to 1912, led a long campaign against food adulteration, culminating in the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act. The high‐visibility activist Gifford Pinchot ran the Bureau of Forestry (later Forest Service) from 1898 to 1910, pursuing a policy of sustained use that has remained largely unchanged.

Working in the Bureau of Plant Industry during the early twentieth‐century period when the boll‐weevil infestation began to devastate the southern cotton industry, Seaman A. Knapp started “demonstration farms” to persuade farmers to try new methods developed by agricultural scientists, particularly those in the Bureau of Entomology. Knapp's success led to the Smith‐Lever Act of 1914, which formed the Extension Service as a cooperative program of the USDA and land‐grant colleges.

The USDA became a cabinet‐level department in 1889. Secretary James Wilson (1897–1913) oversaw the expansion of scientific work in the bureaus, the establishment of federal experiment stations in new territories such as Hawai'i and Puerto Rico, and the introduction of new crops and varieties by the “plant explorer” David Fairchild. Henry C. Wallace (1921–1923) increased the department's work in agricultural economics, recognizing that merely improving production did not guarantee prosperity for farmers. His son, Henry A. Wallace (1933–1940), implemented such New Deal programs as the Agricultural Adjustment Acts, which introduced crop reduction and agricultural subsidies to boost prices, policies that in some form would long remain in place.

Direct contact between department scientists and farmers declined over time. In 1954 the bureaus were abolished and their scientific work reorganized into the Agricultural Research Service. The Food and Drug Administration was removed from the department in 1940. By World War II, the department was emphasizing pesticides to the near exclusion of other methods of insect control, opening it to a storm of criticism by environmentalists after the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962. The controversy reflected a long‐standing ideological divide between advocates of maximum resource utilization in the USDA and preservationists in the Department of the Interior. During the late twentieth century the USDA came under criticism for favoring large agribusinesses and big, rich, white farmers in its scientific research, economic policies, and regulatory actions.
See also Agricultural Education and Extension; Agriculture: 1770s to 1890; Agriculture: The “Golden Age” (1890–1920); Agriculture: Since 1920; Food and Diet; Forests and Forestry; Homestead Act; Livestock Industry; New Deal Era, The.

Bibliography

A. Hunter Dupree , Science in the Federal Government, 1957.
Alan I Marcus and Richard Lowitt, eds., The United States Department of Agriculture in Historical Perspective, Agricultural History 642, special issue, (1990).

Richard C. Sawyer

Other Departments As the authority and sheer size of the federal government expanded over the course of American history, so did the number of cabinet‐level departments within the executive branch. Since the creation in 1789 of three great executive departments (Treasury, State, and War), lawmakers have added eleven cabinet‐level departments to address new problems, interest‐group pressures, and functions that could not be met easily by the original three. Eight of the current fourteen departments in the executive branch were created in the twentieth century, and six alone after 1960. Charged with broad responsibilities, cabinet‐level departments are the largest units of the contemporary executive branch.

Department of the Interior (1849).

Although a “home affairs” or “interior” department was proposed in the earliest days of the republic, Congress resisted until the administration of James Knox Polk. Polk's treasury secretary, Robert J. Walker, strongly supported an interior department, arguing that managing the public lands of an expanding nation was overly burdensome for his department. Walker was especially daunted by U.S. acquisitions of vast new territories following the Mexican War and the 1848 treaty with Britain ceding much of the Oregon Territory to the United States. After heated debate, Congress in 1849 approved an administration plan establishing the Department of the Interior. The measure shifted to the Interior Department the General Land Office from Treasury, the Patent Office from State, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Pension Office from War.

For most of its history, Interior's policies reflected the notion that the public lands and natural resources under its management were practically limitless and should be fully developed to promote national growth and prosperity. The environmental movement altered the politics and policies of the department, however. Stewart L. Udall, President John F. Kennedy's interior secretary in the early 1960s, forged closer ties with the environmental movement. Udall, a supporter of national parks and environmental preservation during his years as a congressman, fostered department initiatives for improving the national park system, resource planning, and outdoor recreation. After Udall's tenure, the Interior Department found itself drawn into heated political conflicts pitting environmental groups against mining, logging, and other development interests. Secretary Cecil D. Andrus (1977–1981) drew fire from corporate interests for championing new controls on strip mining, stronger protection of the Alaska wilderness, and new efforts to redress chemical contamination. His successor, Ronald Reagan appointee James G. Watt, faced withering criticism from environmental groups who protested his plans for private use of resources in the public domain, stronger state control over public lands, and the appointment of prodevelopment personnel.

Former Arizona governor Bruce Babbitt, secretary of the interior in the Bill Clinton administration, found himself at the center of tense struggles over grazing, mining, logging, and controlled‐burn policies. As the twentieth century ended, Interior was responsible for managing the nation's natural resources, including its wildlife and nearly 600 million acres of public lands. Among its thirty major bureaus and agencies were the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the National Park Service.

Department of Commerce (1903).

Amid rapid industrialization and economic development, a modest commerce agency was formed within the executive branch in 1888. After the Panic of 1893, business interests such as the National Association of Manufacturers lobbied strenuously for a cabinet‐level department of commerce. In 1903, courting both business and labor support, President Theodore Roosevelt won congressional approval for a Department of Commerce and Labor. With over ten thousand employees, the department's functions included regulating foreign and domestic commerce; the mining, manufacturing, shipping, and fishing industries; labor interests; and transportation. The 1913 creation of a Labor Department resulted in an independent Department of Commerce.

Departmental authority and resources expanded sharply under the ambitious leadership of commerce secretary and presidential aspirant Herbert Hoover (1921–1928). Under Hoover, Commerce's budget soared from $860,000 in 1920 to $38 million in 1928. When Hoover became president in 1929, Commerce remained a powerful department. But in the antibusiness climate of the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Dealers did not look kindly at Commerce. Significantly reducing its budget and authority, they even considered dissolving the department altogether.

Although Commerce weathered New Deal Era assaults, many of its traditional functions were subsequently taken over or shared by other executive agencies. Regulation of transportation was shifted to a new Department of Transportation in 1967. By the 1990s, responsibilities for commerce, trade, and economic analysis were shared with a host of other agencies, such as the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the Council of Economic Advisers, and Treasury. Nevertheless, Commerce continued to play an important collaborative part in these areas and to manage various programs to aid American businesses, encourage technological innovation, and enhance U.S. fortunes in international trade. Commerce Secretary Ron Brown died in a plane crash in 1996 while leading a group of U.S. businesspeople on a trade mission to the former Yugoslavia. The Commerce Department also is responsible for conducting the federal census.

Department of Labor (1913).

Labor activists lobbied vigorously in the 1880s for a cabinet‐level department dedicated to the needs of organized labor. A small Bureau of Labor was created in 1884 within the Interior Department, followed in 1888 by an independent Department of Labor without cabinet rank. When a Department of Commerce and Labor was established in 1903, labor activists protested that it would be captured by business interests. In 1913, a Democratic Congress created a separate cabinet‐level Department of Labor. During the New Deal Era under Secretary Frances Perkins (1933–1945) the Department of Labor gained new prominence. The 1960s brought further expansion as Secretary W. Willard Wirtz forged close alliances with organized labor.

During the Reagan administration, the Labor Department faced budget cuts and charges of lax enforcement of worker‐protection laws. President George Bush's first Labor secretary, Elizabeth H. Dole, revitalized the department, winning budget increases, making worker safety a key objective, negotiating an increase in the minimum wage, and pressing companies receiving government contracts to move more women and minorities into managerial positions. Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich (1993–1997) further restored departmental prominence, emphasizing education and training for unskilled workers in a global economy while overseeing Labor's responsibility for occupational health and safety, antidiscrimination in employment, worker's compensation, unemployment insurance, minimum wages and overtime pay, pension rights, and free collective bargaining. The department also maintains job training and manpower programs (such as Job Corps) and collects labor statistics.

Department of Health and Human Services (1979).

The roots of the Department of Health and Human Services date to the Federal Security Administration (FSA), formed in 1939 to coordinate various agencies responsible for health, education, and Social Security programs. The Federal Children's Bureau (1912) was transferred from Labor to the FSA a few years later. In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower won legislative approval for making the FSA a cabinet‐level department, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), which soon grew into one of the largest departments in the federal government. Social Security expanded steadily, providing disability insurance in 1956 and gradually increasing retirement benefits while easing eligibility standards. HEW responsibilities grew again in 1965 with new Medicare hospital insurance for the elderly and a Medicaid program to fund medical expenses of the poor.

With the creation of the Department of Education in 1979, HEW became the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). HHS functions were reduced again when the Social Security Administration became an independent agency in 1995, thereby distancing the program from political pressures. Despite this streamlining, HHS retained a broad mandate, administering Medicare and Medicaid and overseeing the work of the surgeon general, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Despite reforms in the Clinton years shifting responsibility for welfare to the states, HHS continued to oversee numerous programs designed to promote the welfare of children, families, and the elderly.

Department of Housing and Urban Development (1965).

Endorsed by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) was created in 1965 to address a host of urban problems: housing shortages, pollution, poor mass transit and roadways, and a general decline of the urban infrastructure. Controversial from the start, HUD was called on to promote fair housing practices, provide rent supplements and public housing for the urban poor, and help poor families buy their own homes. During the 1980s, however, the Reagan administration sharply reduced federal housing programs and slashed HUD resources. President Bush's HUD secretary, Jack Kemp, tried to position the department at the vanguard of domestic policy innovation. In a 1990 housing‐reform law, Kemp won approval for a plan to help public housing tenants and other poor persons purchase homes. After the 1991 riots in Los Angeles, he successfully pressed Congress to create enterprise zones offering tax breaks to businesses locating in inner‐city areas.

Department of Transportion (1966).

Established to coordinate the government's labyrinthine transportation policy, the Department of Transportation (DOT) in fact never received broad authority to manage the national transportation system. Various key agencies, such as the National Transportation Safety Board, were made independent of the department's secretary. Despite its narrow authority, DOT played an important role in deregulating the airline, railroad, and trucking industries in the late 1970s, and in promulgating new rules for making public facilities handicapped‐accessible. DOT oversees the Coast Guard, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Railroad Administration, public mass transit systems, and the nation's highway system.

Department of Energy (1977).

The immediate impetus for an energy department was the 1973 Arab oil embargo, which led to the creation in 1974 of two federal agencies, the Energy Research and Development Administration and the Federal Energy Administration, to design and implement a national energy policy. These agencies were consolidated into a Department of Energy in 1977. President Jimmy Carter gave the new department prominence, arguing that it should have broad discretion to address national energy problems. During the late 1970s, Energy promoted conservation by embracing solar power and other alternative technologies as well as new ways to burn fossil fuels. Federal regulation of energy markets was rolled back during the Reagan years, while Energy secretaries James B. Edwards and Donald P. Hodel promoted nuclear power. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 placed the Energy Department at the center of political controversy by giving it responsibility for locating, constructing, and operating sites for the disposal of civilian and military nuclear waste. The department also monitors U.S. energy consumption and promotes new energy technologies.

Department of Education (1979).

Given the decentralized structure of the U.S. educational system, the creation of a federal education department was relatively late in coming and highly controversial. When the Department of Education was formed in 1979 with strong backing from the powerful National Education Association, a teachers' union, Congress stipulated that the new department “shall not diminish the responsibility for education which is reserved to the states and local school systems”. Lacking a broad mandate to shape education policy, departmental efforts to overhaul American education were routinely frustrated by Congress, and Republican leaders periodically called for dismantling the department altogether. The department administers federal funds to enhance preschool, elementary, and secondary schooling; to educate handicapped children and rehabilitate disabled adults; and to help young adults pay for postsecondary education. In the 1990s, the department became embroiled in debate over “school choice” plans, a proposed national examination for students, and merit standards for teachers.

Department of Veterans' Affairs (1989).

Since the Revolutionary War, various government programs were established to assist veterans and their dependents. These programs were scattered among different federal agencies until Congress in 1930 placed them under the control of the Veterans Administration (VA). The VA's resources and functions expanded significantly after World War II, as the number of American veterans soared to nineteen million. By the 1980s, more than twenty‐seven million Americans were veterans and roughly one‐third of the population were dependents and survivors of veterans. Veterans groups lobbied vigorously for the VA's elevation to cabinet status, and the Reagan administration strongly agreed. Although a congressionally mandated report by the National Academy of Public Administration found “no compelling reason” to make the VA a cabinet‐level department, lawmakers bowed to political pressure and established a Department of Veterans' Affairs in 1989. In the 1990s, the department won special benefits for Vietnam War and Persian Gulf War veterans suffering illnesses related to exposure to harmful chemicals. Its major responsibilities include oversight of an extensive veterans health care system, various benefits programs for veterans and their families, and maintenance of 147 national military cemeteries.

Department of Homeland Security (2003).

Authorized by Congress in November 2002 and established in January 2003, the Department of Homeland Security absorbed twenty-two federal agencies to assume central responsibility for domestic security in the United States. This reorganization of the federal government's executive branch—the largest in more than fifty years—came in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. After initial resistance, Republican president George W. Bush led the campaign for the new department, but Democrats criticized his demand that the new department be granted greater “flexibility” in hiring and firing federal workers, who are heavily unionized. In the 2002 midterm elections, Republicans regained control of the Senate, in part by casting this Democratic opposition as a sign of weakness on national security. Congress authorized the new department shortly afterwards, with Tom Ridge, a Bush friend and former Republican governor of Pennsylvania, at its head.

The department was organized into four Directorates. “Border and Transportation Security” incorporated the Customs Service, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the Coast Guard, among other agencies. “Emergency Preparedness and Response” succeeded the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear Countermeasures” oversaw protection against threats involving weapons of mass destruction. “Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection” organized intelligence gathering and analysis with assistance from the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, both of which remained independent. The new department was also given responsibility for public readiness: the Homeland Security Advisory System, for example, alerted Americans to the perceived threat level through five color codes ranging from “Low” (green) to “Severe” (red).
See also Civil Defense; Civil Rights Legislation; Forests and Forestry; Immigration Law; Land Policy, Federal; Energy Crisis of the 1970s; War on Terrorism; Patent and Copyright Law.

Bibliography

Mary L. Hinsdale , A History of the President's Cabinet, 1911.
Henry Barrett Learned , The President's Cabinet: Studies in the Origin, Formation, and Structure of an American Institution, 1912.
Richard Fenno , The President's Cabinet, 1959.
Bradley H. Patterson Jr. , The President's Cabinet: Issues and Questions, 1976.
John P. Burke , The Institutional Presidency, 1992.
W. Craig Bledsoe and and Leslie Rigby , The Cabinet and Executive Departments, in Cabinets and Counselors: The President and the Executive Branch, 1997, pp. 73–140.
Ronald C. Moe , The President's Cabinet, in Understanding the Presidency, eds. James P. Pfiffner and Roger H. Davidson, 1997, pp. 136–55.
Yonah Alexander and Don Musch, eds., Terrorism and Homeland Security, 2004.

David L. Herzberg

Daniel J. Tichenor