Cabinet of the United States

The **Cabinet of the United States** is a body consisting of the Vice President of the United States and the heads of the executive branch's federal executive departments in the federal government of the United States, which is regarded as the principal advisory body to the President of the United States. The president is not formally a member of the Cabinet. The heads of departments, appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, are members of the Cabinet, and acting department heads also sit at the Cabinet meetings whether or not they have been officially nominated for Senate confirmation. The president may designate heads of other agencies and non-Senate-confirmed members of the Executive Office of the President as Cabinet-level members of the Cabinet.

The Cabinet does not have any collective executive powers or functions of its own, and no votes need to be taken. The Cabinet meets with the president in a room adjacent to the Oval Office. The members sit in the order in which their respective department was created, with the earliest being closest to the president and the newest farthest away.

The members of the Cabinet serve at the pleasure of the president, who can dismiss them at any time without the approval of the Senate, as affirmed by the Supreme Court of the United States in *Myers v. United States* (1926), or downgrade their Cabinet membership status. The president can organize the Cabinet as he sees fit, such as instituting committees. Like all federal public officials, Cabinet members are also subject to impeachment by the House of Representatives and trial in the Senate.

The Constitution of the United States does not explicitly establish a Cabinet. The Cabinet's role, inferred from the language of the Opinion Clause (Article II, Section 2, Clause 1) of the Constitution is to provide advice to the president. Additionally, the Twenty-fifth Amendment authorizes the vice president, together with a majority of the heads of the executive departments, to declare the president "unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office". The heads of the executive departments are—if eligible—in the presidential line of succession.

## History

The tradition of the Cabinet arose out of the debates at the 1787 Constitutional Convention regarding whether the president would exercise executive authority solely or collaboratively with a cabinet of ministers or a privy council. George Washington, the first president of the United States, organized his principal officers into a Cabinet, and it has been part of the executive branch structure ever since. Washington's Cabinet consisted of five members: himself, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of War Henry Knox and Attorney General Edmund Randolph.

Presidents have used Cabinet meetings of selected principal officers but to widely differing extents and for different purposes. In recent administrations, Cabinets have grown to include key White House staff in addition to department and various agency heads.

## References

1. ↑ http://www.whitehousemuseum.org/west-wing/cabinet-room.htm

 Principles and terminology
 Styles
 Administrative divisions