The Cabinet

The word cabinet appears nowhere in the Constitution. Article II says only that the President may require the opinion, in writing, of the principal officer in each of the executive departments. George Washington began meeting with his four department heads, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Henry Knox, and Edmund Randolph, as a group in 1791, and the practice, along with the name borrowed from British government, became permanent. The Twenty-fifth Amendment, ratified in 1967, gave the cabinet its first constitutional role: a majority of the department heads, with the Vice President, can declare a President unable to discharge the powers of the office.

The cabinet consists of the Vice President and the heads of the fifteen executive departments, from State, created in 1789, to Homeland Security, created in 2002. Presidents add cabinet-level officials by choice, typically including the White House chief of staff, the ambassador to the United Nations, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, the Trade Representative, the Director of National Intelligence, the CIA Director, and the heads of the EPA and the Small Business Administration, bringing the total to around twenty-five. All department heads are nominated by the President, confirmed by the Senate, and serve at the President's pleasure.

The fifteen department heads also form most of the presidential line of succession, ranked by the order in which their departments were created, after the Vice President, the Speaker of the House, and the president pro tempore of the Senate. On formal occasions when all of them gather, such as the State of the Union, one is kept away at a secure location as the designated survivor.

As a body the cabinet has rarely made decisions. Most presidents have found it too large and too divided to deliberate, and they govern through the White House staff and smaller groups such as the National Security Council. Abraham Lincoln reportedly closed one vote with seven noes and one aye by announcing that the ayes had it. Cabinet meetings serve mostly to coordinate and to show unity, and recent presidents have used televised meetings as a stage. The cabinet's importance lies in its members individually, who run the departments that carry out nearly everything the executive branch does.