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THE CANDIDATE

Federal hub · Cabinet

The United States Cabinet

The senior advisory body of the executive branch — the Vice President and the heads of the 15 executive departments, appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate.

About the Cabinet

The Cabinet of the United States is the senior advisory body of the executive branch, made up of the Vice President and the heads of the 15 executive departments — the secretaries of State, the Treasury, Defense, and the Attorney General among them.[1] Cabinet members are nominated by the President and, with the exception of the Vice President, confirmed by the United States Senate before taking office.[3]

The Cabinet has no fixed size in the Constitution. It grew department by department as Congress established new executive agencies: State, Treasury, and War (now Defense) were the first, in 1789, and the cabinet reached its modern 15 statutory roles with the Department of Homeland Security in 2003 and the Department of Education in 1979.[1] Each secretary leads a federal department, advises the President, and administers the law within their portfolio.

Cabinet secretaries are not elected. They are appointed by the President and serve at the President’s pleasure, and most must be confirmed by the Senate — the advice-and-consent check that Article II of the Constitution places on the appointment of principal officers.[2][3] A secretary may also serve in an acting capacity, by recess appointment, or by designation, depending on the Vacancies Reform Act and the specific office. Because they are appointed rather than elected, secretaries represent no state and belong to no party in the structured sense; each profile records the appointing president and the appointment type without assigning the secretary a partisan label.

The Candidate tracks every current and former Cabinet secretary across the 15 statutory roles — sourced biographies, appointment and service records, and a versioned machine-readable dataset per department.

Sources

  1. [1]https://www.whitehouse.gov/administration-cabinet/WhiteHouse.gov · retrieved 2026-06-30
  2. [2]https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-2/U.S. Constitution / Congress.gov · retrieved 2026-06-30
  3. [3]https://www.senate.gov/civics/reference/common/briefing/confirmation_cabinet.htmSenate.gov · retrieved 2026-06-30

Key facts

Constitutional basis
Article II (opinion clause + appointments)
Members
Vice President + 15 executive-department heads
Selection
Presidential nomination + Senate confirmation
Statutory roles
15 (State through Education)
Newest department
Homeland Security (2003)
Tenure
Serves at the pleasure of the President

Cabinet departments

Browse every current and former secretary by department — the full roster of each statutory Cabinet role, with sourced appointment and service records.

Sources & provenance

Every quantitative or attributable claim above carries a per-section [N] marker that resolves to the corresponding URL below. Each entry records the upstream provider, the canonical URL, and the timestamp at which the underlying source was retrieved.

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