How the Executive Branch Functions

Below you will find an excerpt from an essay by Gary North that appeared in a recent edition of Reality Check. Dr. North's succinct and graphic style boils the power politics behind the President's Cabinet down to a few paragraphs.

A President's cabinet is mostly for show. A few of the senior positions are about representing the Powers That Be, meaning the Establishment.

The Secretary of the Treasury is the seat for the big banks and financial institutions. These days, this is the Goldman Sachs slot.

The Secretary of State is the seat for one of the factions in [the] Council on Foreign Relations. Today's position is filled by a rival politician whose husband was vetted by the CFR in 1992. The main person who promoted him in early 1992 was the legendary Washington party-giver, Pamela Harriman, the former wife -- among many others -- of the late Averill Harriman (d. 1986), one of the six "Wise Men" in modern American foreign policy. She had even
been the daughter-in-law of Winston Churchill for a while.

The Attorney General is vetted by the lawyer's guild. He may be a politician-lawyer, who receives a reward for faithful partisan political service, or he may be a faithful lap dog
during the first term of a President's Administration.

The other positions are more openly payoffs to special- interest voting blocs. Think of the Secretary of Commerce or the Secretary of Labor. Big business vets the first; labor union
leaders screen the second. Guess who vets the Secretary of Agriculture? What about the Secretary of Education? And, lest we forget, what about the Secretary of Defense? You get the
idea.

Most of these people are selected for show. They convey the impression to voters that each group is represented in the Administration. Each group is represented, meaning each group's
full-time organizational agents is represented. This representation has to do with voting blocs every four years. Neither political party alienates any of these agents completely.
It is a matter of shifting departmental budgets at the margin.

Each administers a gigantic bureaucracy that is protected by Civil Service. These subordinates cannot legally be fired. They survive every Administration. They keep the system running according to whatever makes life easier for bureaucrats.

A department Secretary can change almost nothing. He acts as a spokesman -- one might say "shill" -- for the bureaucrats who are officially under him, but who are operationally over him
because they control the flow of information to him. His main task is to make sure the department's budget grows each fiscal year. The President wants this, and so do the bureaucrats. So do the special-interest groups whose interests are represented by
the department.

Each Secretary goes out on the rubber chicken circuit lecture to give carefully vetted speeches to local and regional conferences held by the special-interest group. He or she is
supposed to keep the special-interest group in line behind whatever the Administration is doing to expand the power of the special-interest group over the American people. This means
getting its fair share -- plus a little more -- of Federal budget. Like the children of Lake Wobegone, each department is expected to do better than average, budget-wise.