Today we are learning about the US Cabinet. The first thing I have learned is that its government name is unironically the Cabinet of the United States (COTUS, presumably) which sounds as if it is the people’s Cabinet, and not just the President’s personal stash of advisors. Oh, also, because capitalists are afraid of people with functional ADHD, I can’t get my prescription filled so we’re going to take a moment and look up the etymology of cabinet because why are these (below) the same word?
I just spent twenty minutes looking through pictures of cabinets?? None of them felt representative?? It was very distressing! Then I thought oh maybe it would be fun to find a classic TV show set, but then I started to worry about what show I was platforming over another show and who has been cancelled and at any rate mostly I saw pictures of casts posing over and over again or just unrelated kitchens. It’s been actually a terrible time and I finally decided to just go to IKEA dot com. Took five seconds and I kind of no longer care about the etymology??
I do, however, care about follow-through, so for your records:
Naturally, one deduces that the principal official advisors to the president are best thought of as secret presidential valuables. This makes sense with the current cabinet because I would prefer they were locked away and any value they provide to this country is definitely a well-kept secret.
Who are these advisors?
There are currently 23 members of the Cabinet: the vice president, 15 department heads, and 7 Cabinet-level officials, almost all of whom require Senate confirmation (for whatever that is worth).
The 15 departments (in order of when they were created): State, Treasury, the Interior, Agriculture, Justice, Commerce, Labor, Defense, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Energy, Education, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security.
Cabinet-level officials vary by president and are not in the line of succession; currently we have: Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Director of National Intelligence, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, United States Trade Representative, Administrator of the Small Business Administration, and the Chief of Staff.
Federal law says that Cabinet members have the authority to act on behalf of the president within their specified areas of responsibility. What actions are these? How do they affect us? What even does the government do?
Random reminder for no reason: The Executive Branch Cannot Make Laws
Hidden Systems
I recently read the book Hidden Systems by Dan Nott which explains (in illustrations! and non-technical descriptions!) how we get water, electricity, and internet. We rely on water, electricity, and internet just being there when we turn a knob, flip a switch, or open a browser. They feel like natural resource–like rivers; the drinking water river empties into our sinks, the power river circulates our walls, the internet river well these days we actually rely on internet clouds instead of rivers. Of course, there is nothing natural about underground pipes or tubes or overhead wires. Not only was human invention and innovation required for these resources, so was a lot of human labor. Whenever human labor is involved, you can ask yourself who did the laboring and under whose directives and how were they compensated. Whenever systems are created, you can ask yourself who decided where access points were. Nott’s book opens a window into thinking about the politics of these systems we only really notice when they don’t work.
The executive branch of the federal government is itself a hidden system; in 2023 it employed over 2 million workers, not including the military, and each employee is tasked with, essentially, seeming unnecessary for routine life. Ideally everything just… works: the water, the electricity, the internet, the traffic lights, the school buses, the bridges. Ideally, we are kept safe… from known dangers, known threats, known toxins, preventable diseases, foreseeable disasters. Well, how “ideally” works is that you have people in charge of knowing or finding out how to keep things as close to ideal as feasible, and they hire all the people necessary to set up and maintain the systems required to keep things as close to ideal as feasible. It takes a lot of work–a lot of human labor–and outside of certain people in uniforms, we basically do not know who they are or what they do. We do not know that they are essential. And when politicians say it doesn’t take billions of dollars to run a system you don’t know exists… it sounds like a possible opinion one could have. When pundits say it doesn’t take hundreds of thousands of employees paid for by tax money to maintain systems that they didn’t teach you in school… it sounds like a reasonable political opinion someone might have.
Next Steps
I have never understood the federal government and I frankly thought that was just fine, thank you. Especially as I had no intentions of running for office. In 2025, however, it feels dangerous not to know what the federal government was responsible, because Trump is appointing cartoon villains to his Cabinet and they are turning everything upside down. I do not see how I can keep my children safe if I don’t know what systems I have relied on that are about to deteriorate.
I hope you will join me, and if anyone already knows stuff, feel free to reply!