- [Instructor] You can view this diagram
as an org chart of the government
of the United States, and what we have
highlighted in this blue-green color,
that is the executive branch,
the things that fall under the executive branch.
And you can't even see everything,
a lot of it falls off of the screen.
When you see something like this
with roughly 2.6 million people,
part of that executive branch,
part of the government's bureaucracy,
and with the president at the top
of the executive branch, you might get the idea
that the president is quite powerful.
And you would be correct.
The president has a powerful role,
but there're some factors about how
the executive branch is structured
and its size that might keep the president
from being quite as powerful
as you might first believe.
First of all, managing 2.6 million people
is no easy task.
Ask anyone who even has to manage
an organization of 20 or 30 people,
much less 2,000 people or 200,000 people,
it can get quite difficult.
You have to manage through many layers of management.
The other interesting thing
that makes the president's role
in the executive branch different
than, say, the CEO of a corporation,
is that yes, the president can make
many appointments, in fact, the president
can make several thousand appointments
and most of those appointments
sit atop the various departments.
But most of the bureaucracy,
the federal bureaucracy, most of this 2.6 million,
they are not appointed by the president.
Those are professionals in their field,
they are part of the civil service system.
So, as they make various judgements
and interpret laws in certain ways
and execute the machinery of the bureaucracy,
they might not be completely in lockstep
with the goals of the president,
the goals that the president has
for their administration.
Related to that, the senior appointments,
especially the cabinet secretaries,
those serve at the pleasure of the president.
If the president becomes unhappy with them,
if the president finds that they're disloyal
in some way, the president
can choose to have them leave,
essentially fire them, although in the news
you'll sometimes see as the president
accepts their resignation.
But as you get further down the bureaucracy,
the president does not have that control.
The Supreme Court has ruled that for officers
the president can fire them.
But as you go down into the regular ranking file,
the majority of this 2.6 million people,
the president can't fire them without cause.
The president can't fire them just because
they don't like those employees
or they feel that those employees
don't completely agree with the president.
It has to be for a just cause.
This is why you'll see that some parts
of the executive branch, say,
from the Department of Justice,
they might have investigations
into things that the president
does not want them to investigate into.
Often times they will investigate the president.
This happened during the Nixon administration,
part of the Watergate investigations.
This happened under the Clinton administration.
This is happening at the time of this video
as part of the Trump administration,
the Mueller investigation.
And the president can't just willy-nilly
fire folks if they say,
"Hey, why are you looking into my matters?"
because of this principle.
So they can't fire just anyone
within the executive branch.
Now, what leverage does the president have
to maybe exert more control
than the things that I have just described?
Well, of course, I've mentioned
the appointments that the president can make,
and this could number
in the several thousands of appointments.
I've seen estimates as high as 4,000
appointments that the president can make.
They can fire, the president can fire officers.
So these would be the senior political appointments,
things like the cabinet secretaries,
the people at the head
of these various departments.
But even that could have
some significant political consequences.
The president could try to shift
responsibilities from one part
of the bureaucracy to another,
or shift budget from one part
of the bureaucracy to another.
But this is also not so easy,
'cause once again it's a large
and complex bureaucracy.
The president would have to do it
through many layers of management.
And at the end of the day things like budget,
which department gets how much money,
this is, at the end of the day,
something that the Congress will decide
as once again part of the separation
of powers that we've talked about
in multiple videos.
Another thing that the president can try to do,
and we've talked about this in other videos,
are the idea of executive orders.
Executive orders often times can
be a president trying to clarify
how a law should be interpreted,
how it should be executed upon
by the bureaucracy, if the president feels
that its bureaucracy is not interpreting laws
in the way that meets the president's goals.
So I will leave you there.
The president clearly the most powerful
office in the United States,
on top of a 2.6 million person bureaucracy
that's part of the executive branch.
But the president is not a king,
the president is not a chief executive officer
of a for-profit company where they can have
a lot more control.
They're limited by just
the inertia of the bureaucracy.
They're limited by the ability
to hire and fire people.
They're limited by the complexity
of the bureaucracy.
But they do have some tools at their disposal,
where they can try to shape the direction
and the goals of these
2.6 million federal employees.