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Executive Branch
In The Spirit of the Laws (1748), the French jurist and legal scholar Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Bréde et de Montesquieu (1689–1755), identified three separate branches in the British government: the legislative, executive, and judicial. When such powers were combined rather than kept separate, he argued, tyranny might result. The separation of powers of government, along with checks and balances, was a basic principle accepted by the Framers of the Constitution in creating a new system of government for the United States.
The U.S. Constitution and many other national constitutions, including those of Chile (1981, significantly amended 1989), Slovakia (1993), and Poland (1997), have incorporated Montesquieu’s principle and created at least three major branches of government. While the legislative branch enacts laws and the judicial branch interprets and applies the laws in individual disputes, the executive branch implements and enforces the laws. The basic provisions of the U.S. Constitution that relate to the executive branch are found in Article II.
“The administration of government, in its largest sense,” noted Alexander Hamilton in essay 72 of The Federalist (1787–88) (see Federalist Papers), “comprehends all the operations of the body politic, whether legislative, executive, or judiciary; but in its most usual and perhaps in its most precise signification, it is limited to executive details, and falls peculiarly within the province of the executive department.”
The Federal Bureaucracy
The sheer size of the federal government’s executive branch today is staggering. It encompasses fifteen cabinet-level departments, including the Department of Defense and all U.S. military personnel (see Armed Forces), as well as smaller departments, independent administrative agencies, and other specialized bodies such as administrations, commissions, councils, and offices (see chart, page 9). According to the president’s budget for fiscal year 2008, executive branch civilian employees in 2006 numbered approximately 2.6 million persons, compared to approximately 63,000 employees in the other two branches combined; the annual payroll in 2006 for the executive branch was then more than $177 billion.
The cabinet secretaries, as heads of the executive departments, and some other administrative bodies, such as the Office of Management and Budget and the National Security Council, are directly responsible to the president. Other independent bodies, including the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission, are not directly supervised by the president. These bodies have statutory authority to perform certain functions that require a relative balance of political interests; in addition, their heads serve set terms of office and therefore may not be summarily removed by the president (see Appointment and Removal Power).
The federal bureaucracy, as the executive branch is sometimes referred to, can be a source of strength to a president in carrying out his policies, but it can also be a hindrance and frustration. The nation’s first president, George Washington, had only three executive departments and an attorney general, along with a few hundred civilian employees. But the executive branch could cause headaches for the chief executive even then. Washington’s secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, had his own political philosophy and agenda, which often brought him into conflict with the secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton. The thirty-ninth president, Jimmy Carter (b. 1924), once reflected, “I…was warned that dealing with the federal bureaucracy would be one of the worst problems I would have to face. It has been worse than I had anticipated.”
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