The Cabinet

2002-2022 | 20 years

This episode starts with the President thanking his cabinet for their service in his first term. The Cabinet is made up of the secretaries that head the 15 executive departments-the Secretaries of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Labor, State, Transportation, Treasury, and Veterans Affairs, and the Attorney General (who heads justice department). The President gets to appoint the members of his cabinet, who then need to be confirmed by the Senate. The Senate has generally confirmed Presidents’ cabinet appointees. 

The only power outlined in the Constitution for cabinet members is that under the 25th amendment a majority of the cabinet, along with the Vice President, they can declare the President “unable to discharge the powers and duties” of his office, starting a process of removing a President from office. This power is meant to be used in a scenario where the President has a medical or other type of emergency and isn’t able to declare himself unable to perform the duties of the presidency himself. The cabinet members advise the President regarding their respective fields, along with leading their respective departments. While the Cabinet secretaries have very little power outlined in the Constitution, they play a big role in the function of the executive government and their departments, and in that way hold power.

The members of the cabinet are also part of the Presidential line of succession, or the order of people who would assume the presidency should the President not be able to serve the office for whatever reason. The Vice President would be the first to assume the presidency, followed by the Speaker of the House, the Senate President Pro Tempore, and then the cabinet members in the order that their departments were created. Each time there is an event where everyone in the line of succession will be together, like a State of the Union or Inaguration, one person from the cabinet is chosen as the “designated survivor”. The designated survivor does not go to the event and is instead secured at an undisclosed location so that if there is a mass-casualty incident there would still be someone to assume the Presidency. What makes this so interesting is that the person chosen to be the designated survivor is often one of the lesser-known secretaries (because the White House wants familiar faces to be at the event) meaning that, should a designated survivor assume the presidency, it is likely the majority of the country would have no idea who they are.

At the beginning of this episode, after the President thanks his cabinet for their service, Leo asks for them all to resign by the end of the day, something which CJ explains is a tradition for the cabinet to do at the end of a President’s first term, so he has the choice of whether to hire them or not instead of whether to fire them or not. But this isn’t the case. In The West Wing Weekly, former White House Cabinet Secretary Chris Lu shared that because of this episode, some people in the Obama Administration during the transition to the second term believed the cabinet was supposed to resign. One of the podcast’s hosts, Joshua Malina, commented that this was an example of “Life imitating art imitating life”. I for one would be happy to see more of life imitating The West Wing.