The Council of Economic Advisers is another important unit of the executive office. It is a three-member council of economic experts, appointed with Senate approval, which helps the president form a national economic policy and gives him advice on economic developments. The cabinet departments, created by Congress, are the major agencies of the federal government. The expansion of the cabinet has been due largely to the growth of problems that people wanted the federal government to deal with. Recently there have been competing efforts to both remove departments and create new ones.
Cabinet secretaries hold office as long as the president wishes.
Because cabinet secretaries have large bureaucracies to manage, however, they have less loyalty to the president than do members of the executive office. Pressures from their staff and constant involvement with the problems of their agencies may cause secretaries to act more like lobbyists for their departments than representatives of the president. Because of this detachment they often play a secondary role to the White House office. Cabinet secretaries in the Clinton administration frequently complained that they were not included in important decisions and that young, and arrogant, White House staffers were blocking their access to the president. This does not mean that these cabinet secretaries are removed from partisan politics.