Are Department Secretaries Really a President's Natural Enemies?

Abstract

It is widely believed that there exists in the United States a phenomenon called ‘clientelism’: that most federal government departments in the USA do not really control the interests with whom they do business but rather are controlled by them; that the interests and the departments between them typically have great influence over the department secretaries appointed by the president; and that in consequence a department secretary is, in reality, more likely to act as the interests' spokesman, or as his department's, than as the spokesman of the president. Thus it is often asserted that ‘cabinet officers are a president's natural enemies’. My aim in this article is to show that this belief, as it relates to the relationship between department secretaries and presidents, is widely held, plausible, but mistaken.