(11 of 11)
-The Cabinet should be reorganized and given more authority. The Cabinet originally consisted of only five men, the Secretaries of State, War and Treasury, Attorney General and Postmaster General, and several of these, notably Jefferson and Hamilton, saw themselves as future Presidents. Today the Cabinet numbers 17, and, as with the White House staff, several unnecessarily represent the demands of special interests for special attention (the foremost example, the Department of Education, was created mainly because teachers' unions wanted it). Since it is an iron law that committees lose effectiveness in inverse ratio to their size, the Cabinet's growth has helped turn it into a show-and-tell group that has little collective authority. Its lesser members have hardly any access to the President.
In 1971 a presidential commission headed by Litton Industries President Roy Ash recommended to Nixon that seven departments (Labor, Agriculture, Transportation, Interior, Commerce, HEW and HUD) be merged into four: Natural Resources, Human Resources, Economic Development and Community Development. The proposal was made at a tune when the Democratic Congress felt resentful of Nixon's aggressive assertion of presidential powers, constitutional and otherwise.
With the support of various lobbies, it balked at the changes.
The Ash plan still has merit. Just as the armed forces are more coherently served by a Secretary of Defense than by rival Cabinet officers representing the Army, Navy and Air Force, the various economic interests represented by the seven departments (which grew to nine under Carter) would benefit by coordination. Indeed, the number of "superdepartments" might be reduced even further by merging Economic Development with Community Development.
THE CAVE OF WINDS
Most efforts to rationalize or reform the workings of Government come to an end, of one sort or another, in the wilderness of Congress. It was here, and not in the presidency, that the authors of the Constitution established the basic powers of Government. When Andrew Jackson first stated the modern notion that he represented the people, ex-President John Quincy Adams, who had been elected to Congress, shouted back from the floor of the House: "No, we are the representatives of the people!" The Constitution gives Congress not only the basic authority to levy taxes and make war but also the power to reorganize—or refuse to reorganize—both the Administration and itself.
Congress has repeatedly given away its powers to importunate Presidents, then tried to snatch them back. In the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of 1964, it told Johnson he could take any action he chose in Southeast Asia; in the War Powers Act of 1973, it told Nixon that he could not use force anywhere without its approval. All congressional efforts to assert executive authority, however, run afoul of the fact that a bicameral legislature of 535 members has difficulty making up its collective mind, particularly in tricky questions of foreign policy. Individually, too, the legislators are often vulnerable to local pressures—an outcry from Greek constituents agitated about the Turks, or New England trawlermen worried about fishing boundaries off Canada.