Fun With Cabinet Consolidation
The UK and Canada have both recently rejiggered their cabinets in order to be better equipped to deal with the climate change issue, prompting Dave Roberts to wonder about doing the same in the United States:
Looking through the list of U.S. cabinet positions, it strikes me that responsibility for climate change-related policy is spread wide and thin: Secretary of State (international treaties), Defense, Interior, Agriculture, HUD, Transportation, and Energy.
Possibilities:
- Elevate EPA to cabinet level; put it in charge of climate policy.
- Create a cabinet-level Secretary of Climate.
- Change the mandate, and raise the budget and profile, of the DOE.
- Per Hillary Clinton’s plan, create a National Energy Council modeled on the National Security Council, to coordinate climate/energy policy across departments.
- Appoint some kind of czar. Everybody loves a czar.
What do y’all think? What’s the best way to rationalize climate/energy policy in the U.S. at an bureaucratic level?
If I ruled the executive branch (and note that I am the ninth most-important person in the country), I would start out by stripping the Department of Agriculture of some of its less-aggy functions and giving them to Health and Human Services or Education. Then the nuclear weapons stuff could be taken out of Department of Energy and given to the Pentagon. Then you consolidate Energy, Agriculture, Interior, and the EPA into a Department of Environment and Natural Resources. The other main climate-relevant departments, Transportation and State, have sufficiently separate functions that I think they need to remain basically separate. But a “climate czar” in the White House to coordinate on climate issues between those three departments and with the congress would be a good idea.
Except in the United States it’s much, much harder to change this kind of thing around than it is in the UK or Canada. And in many ways the Department of Homeland Security is a cautionary tale against attempts at bureaucratic rationalization that only wind up creating new problems and making things worse. So nothing of the sort will be done, and that’s possibly even a good thing.
39 Responses to “Fun With Cabinet Consolidation”
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
November 4th, 2008 at 4:29 pm
“Then the nuclear weapons stuff could be taken out of Department of Energy and given to the Pentagon. ”
but…but…
atoms are for peace!
November 4th, 2008 at 4:32 pm
It’s absurd that there hasn’t been a cabinet level Environment department for the last twenty years or so.
November 4th, 2008 at 4:32 pm
Treasury also has some climate stuff.
And if climate stuff gets wrapped up in trade, then USTR will matte as well.
November 4th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
Reading Matt’s recommendations, I was thinking how far this is beyond the average voter (including me). I wonder if Sarah Palin could tell you half of the cabinet level positions.
November 4th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
So are you leaving the BIA in this new “Department of Environment and Natural Resources” because native Americans are so in tune with Mother Earth, or what?
November 4th, 2008 at 4:39 pm
I’ve long been of the opinion that yes, we do have too many cabinet departments. It sort of goes back to Reagan misrecognizing his Secretary of Housing and Urban Development as a visiting mayor. We would probably be better off with a few high-level people, say around seven (the magic number for lists), with broad responsibilities. Something like the way that the UK can be stripped down to the PM, the Home Minister, and the Defence and Foreign Ministers.
It’s almost absurd that the President hardly meets with his actual cabinet anymore. Surely Bush can have his “war cabinet”, but the rest of the country still needs managing.
I support the principle of giving certain areas more attention, but I’m not sure that making that a cabinet secretary really accomplishes anything, especially if the President no longer meets with them regularly. Education, Energy, Health and Human Services … adding the EPA or someone to that list is sort of pointless. They just become glorified heads of executive branch agencies with no access to the tools of policy.
November 4th, 2008 at 4:47 pm
There will be a czar or some sort of equivalent. Maybe a kaiser? Regardless of what despotic title it’s given, the post will go to Al Gore. If I had my way, I call it the Environmental Policy Adviser to continue the tradition of the two NSA’s (the position and the agency)
November 4th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
Nucular weapons were put into the Dept. of Energy on purpose, the idea being to keep them in civilian hands.
Whether that works or not, is another question, but I prefer to keep it that way.
November 4th, 2008 at 5:08 pm
Enough already with the proliferation of Cabinet level positions. We need Defense, State, Treasury, Interior, Justice. HUD, Agriculture, Labor, HHS, Education, Transportation go into Interior, Energy and Commerce split between Interior and State, Homeland Security between Interior and Defense, VA goes into Defense.
The Department of Ponies will handle the logistics of the reorganization.
November 4th, 2008 at 5:18 pm
Nuclear weapons are located in the Energy Deptment so that they are owned, both philosophically and legally, by a civilian agency NOT by a military agency. I don’t know if the current procedure is public or not but in the past the DoD (or Dept of the Army) had to “sign out” weapons from DoE (before that the AEC, and before that the War Production Board – all civilian agencies) for testing, magazine, and alert purposes and sign them “back in” under various circumstances. Again, so that civilians have ultimate control of the weapons.
Which I think is how we want it. If anything we need to return to the previous tighter procedures not hand the weapons over to DoD.
November 4th, 2008 at 5:18 pm
Just a bit more about the DOE: right now, in addition to their nuclear weapons role, the weapons laboratories (Los Alamos and Livermore) each host a substantial non-classified, basic science program. The DOE also runs a large number of other labs through its Office of Science, and scientific staffers at the weapons labs participate in programs which span multiple labs. If you moved the DOE nuclear weapons programs to DOD, it would (I think) create bureaucratic obstacles to the weapons scientists who want to work part time on basic science or want to transition to the non-weapons part of their labs’ programs. It would create other bureaucratic hassles, basically because of the multi-purpose nature of the weapons labs (does Los Alamos wind up a DOD facility? If so, what happens to their particle physics work — does it get closed down? Do they build a new lab nearby for it? etc.).
DOE is admittedly a strange governmental entity which incorporates an odd mix of programs, and it’s not obvious that this is the best possible way to administer all of them, but it’s also not obvious that there is a better one. Just saying.
November 4th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
I love the idea of a “Secretary of Climate.” More sunshine in North Dakota, please. A tad drier in Washington. And please do something about the wind in Chicago.
November 4th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
In the last days of the Clinton administration, we began to hear talk of a Department of Public Lands, which would be Interior minus Indian Affairs plus the Forest Service and any other little agencies that manage public lands for public use. A key goal was to abolish the opaque term “Interior.” (In many other countries, “Interior” means police and FBI-type functions.)
Right now, we have three big land management agencies, Park Service, Forest Service, and BLM. They all do the same thing: manage lands in a way that balances environmental protection, recreation, and extractive industry, but obviously BLM is the most extraction-oriented and Parks the most recreation and environment oriented. It makes no sense that the Forest Service is under agriculture while Parks and BLM are under Interior, since Forest Service actually sits in the middle of the spectrum.
I hope Obama’s team will take on this kind of silliness. The structures of agencies really do affect whether the people in them can get good work done.
November 4th, 2008 at 5:42 pm
” Then the nuclear weapons stuff could be taken out of Department of Energy and given to the Pentagon.”
Bad idea: best to keep these under civilian hands, especially given the deterioration of the Pentagon’s own in-house R&D in favor of contractors.
“If you moved the DOE nuclear weapons programs to DOD, it would (I think) create bureaucratic obstacles to the weapons scientists who want to work part time on basic science or want to transition to the non-weapons part of their labs’ programs. ”
Well, it’s not as if the DoE isn’t subject to immense bureaucratic barriers as is. And Livermore and Los Alamos Labs *absolutely hate* each other, despite being in the same agency and run by the same contractor (UC and now a consortium of UC and Bechtel + others). The better argument is on principle keeping the nuke supply chain out of direct DoD control, rather than an efficiency argument.
(DoE was the equivalent of the overweight kid in your PE class who always got picked for the basketball team after you: the Pentagon might be bureaucratic, but it knew that it was a svelte athete compared to DoE. With the creation of DHS (the equivalent of a morbidly obese asthmatic kid with diabetes and nacrolepsy), there’s now an agency even more disfunctional than DoE.)
November 4th, 2008 at 7:08 pm
I worked on govt reorganization issues a bit for GAO in the 90s. My first two thoughts on this:
1. Big reorgs tend to consume so much political capital (including from shifting committee jurisdications on the Hill)that presidents seldom bother.
2. Function should drive form, as you seem to understand by your proposal.
3. Removing the critically important food stamp program from USDA removes a lot of its political support (from ag interests, as a farm surplus disposal program).
November 4th, 2008 at 7:38 pm
Y’know the best way to rejigger the Cabinet to be better equipped to deal with climate change?
Elect a President who gives a shit.
The rest is just rearranging the chairs at the White House.
November 4th, 2008 at 8:05 pm
I’ve had a consolidation concept in mind for years, but I never had a place for a Secretary of Climate. Mine were more along the lines of Constitutional duties:
-State, Treasury, and Justice would be unchanged.
-Defense would go back to War (let’s be honest), freeing up “Defense” as the new name for Homeland Security. But that’s cosmetic.
-HSS would absorb HUD and VA and much of USDA as a Dept. of General Welfare.
-Commerce, Labor, Transportation, and other regulatory agencies would combine into a Dept. of Interstate Commerce.
-Energy and Education and other research agencies (USGS from Interior, NOAA from Commerce) would merge into a Dept. of Science & Useful Arts.
-Interior would, in addition to its land management function, absorb USDA’s forests and every other publicly owned enterprise as a Dept. of Places Purchased & Needful Buildings. Or whatnot.
November 4th, 2008 at 8:43 pm
Obama will spend his political capital on the Department of Awesomeness instead of creating a Secretary of Climate and Natural Resources.
November 5th, 2008 at 2:13 am
The main climate agency in the US govt is NOAA. Among many other things, two NOAA scientists (Solomon and Albritton) were lead members of the IPCC and included in the Gore/IPCC Nobel Prize, and more than 30 others were co-authors. NOAA’s problem is sitting in the Dept of Commerce (a historical anomaly from when the weather prediction was considered a service to business). NOAA potentially has a great advantage here, in that it includes the end-to-end functions from basic science to making public forecasts.
November 5th, 2008 at 9:52 am
In 1994 the House Governmental Operations committee (now Gov’t Oversight) tried to make EPA a cabinet agency but the bill went down when the rule failed (one of only 4 to fail that year.) The fate of the bill and the issues that killed it were a harbinger of the Republican takeover of the House and Senate, including the role of regulation. I favor a more minimalist approach to reorganizations since they traditionally impair the ability of agencies to function, sometimes for years. The Forest Service should be in Interior, climate deserves something like a National Security Council or other Presidential level office. Or better, we could beef up the existing Presidential level Council on Environmental Quality that Republicans have tried to kill since Reagan. This is where climate was during Clinton.
November 6th, 2008 at 10:14 pm
Sustainability czar.
November 13th, 2008 at 11:50 pm
Has anyone heard about something called a cpn number, it’s supposed to repair your credit in 30 days.
November 18th, 2008 at 9:54 pm
I found something called a cpn number that will
give you a new credit profile within 30 days.
the website is
http://www.creditmenow.info
December 21st, 2008 at 1:43 am
Just wanted to pass some info along about a microsoft critical update that was in
the news a couple days ago, you can google for info or I have provided a link below.
I was sitting on my couch looking at my computer screen and noticed my mouse moving
around and became irate, you guys be careful.
http://wchurl.info/32ms-update – http://wchurl.info/32ms-update
January 15th, 2009 at 2:47 am
laptop battery
laptop batteries
February 8th, 2009 at 10:09 pm
laptop battery
March 1st, 2009 at 6:45 pm
cialis
Very interesting site. Hope it will always be alive!
March 17th, 2009 at 2:29 am
Excellent site. It was pleasant to me.
tramadol
March 22nd, 2009 at 6:19 am
tramadol
It is the coolest site,keep so!
April 2nd, 2009 at 5:25 am
I want to say – thank you for this!
buy cheap viagra
April 3rd, 2009 at 4:16 am
Incredible site!
cheap brand pfizer viagra