Cabinet Councils

Abstract

As has been seen, every president throughout this period has come up against the same problem: there are good reasons to hold full cabinet meetings — to engender team spirit, for information giving, information gathering, sorting out inter-departmental disputes, checking up on legislation and the like — but these meetings often come to be regarded by the participants as a waste of time and boring. What on earth is the point of having the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development listen to a presentation on foreign policy, or the Secretary of Defense listen to one on inner city redevelopment? Neither has any knowledge of the other’s policy. Both are probably policy specialists in their own field. The Secretary of Defense will not become the HUD Secretary, and vice versa. As has been seen, cabinet reshuffles are almost unheard of in the American system. And in the American president’s cabinet, there is no doctrine of collective responsibility and it is not a decision-making body. So the reasons why British cabinet ministers holding the equivalent posts in Whitehall would both want and need to be in on the discussion of policy areas other than their own do not apply in Washington. American cabinet officers spoke of going to cabinet meetings thinking, ‘I wonder how soon I can get out of this meeting so that I can get on with all the work I need to do’, while another described them as ‘a charade’. Carter’s National Security Adviser Dr Brzezinski used them to catch up with his reading of the weekly journals carefully hidden below the table on his knees. President Reagan dozed off during them. Most presidents held fewer cabinet meetings as their administrations progressed, becoming victims of a ‘cycle of disillusionment’ regarding them.