American Political System: Difference between revisions
→The Cabinet, Executive Departments, and Independent Agencies
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Under the auspices of the Secretaries and the Attorney General are the various government agencies: the Federal Aviation Administration, for example, reports to the Secretary of Transportation and the [[FBI|Federal Bureau of Investigation]] reports to the Attorney General. Some agencies may be (or were) in counter-intuitive departments. The Secret Service (originally founded to combat counterfeiting) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) reported to the Secretary of the Treasury before the Department of Homeland Security was created in 2003.
The ''Department of Defense'' (DoD), in the vernacular known as [[The Pentagon]] (named after the geometrical shape of its headquarters building), is so freaking large in comparison with the other departments that almost 80 percent of the federal workforce gets their paycheck from it, and that the Department of Defense is considered the single largest employer in the US (right ahead of Wal-Mart and McDonald's.)<ref>Note that this figure is arrived at by counting every member of the US Armed Forces in addition to civilian DoD employees, who form a somewhat smaller percentage of the civil service.</ref> The Office of the Secretary of Defense is the mainly civilian staff of the Secretary of Defense (duh!), and apart from the Honorable Mr. or Madam Secretary (who by the way must be a civilian to maintain the alibi of civilian control), there is 1 Deputy Secretary of Defense, 5 Under Secretaries of Defense, 14 Assistant Secretaries of Defense (all appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate); and a myriad of senior civil servants with titles like Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for whatever..., and Deputy Assistant Under Secretary of Defense for whichever…
Had enough of Secretaries? In addition, Defense has separate sub-departments within itself, known as military departments (Department of the Army, Department of the Navy and the Department of the Air Force) which includes the all the armed forces (except for the [[Coast Guard]], which operates under Homeland Security during peactime and under the Department of the Navy during war or at the president's discretion), and they are led by their very own Secretaries, namely the Secretary of the Army, the Secretary of the Navy (or [[NCIS|SECNAV as the special agents]] [[JAG|and service members alike call him or her]]), and the Secretary of the Air Force who are subordinates of the Secretary of Defense. Each of those Secretaries, as you might have guessed, have their very own Under Secretary, and at least 4 Assistant Secretaries (5 in the Army) each.
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