I know it hasn’t happened yet, but there is speculation that NSA Mike Flynn will get fired/“resign.”
Factual question: What’s the record for quickest replacement of a U.S. cabinet officer after assuming office? I know his position didn’t require confirmation, but he’s cabinet-level. Exclude anyone who left because of untimely death or incapacity.
Trump may have already set the record. He fired acting Attorney General Sally Yates on January 30, ten days after she assumed the office from outgoing Attorney General Loretta Lynch. Granted, Yates was only an acting cabinet official and she was a holdover from the previous administration. But her ten-day tenure in office breaks the official record of eleven days: Elihu Washburne, who served eleven days as Secretary of State under Grant before deciding his health was too poor for the job and resigning.
Thanks, though I’m really looking for officials selected by the sitting president. Washburne is a good one, but I think ill health keeps him out of this–unless “ill health” was cover for “we’d better get this guy out before he becomes a liability.”
If the termination of acting officials is counted, I doubt that the dismissal of Yates will set the record. Acting officials are terminated as soon as the new President’s nominee is confirmed, and there will certainly be cases where this has happened less than 10 days after inauguration day.
Well, Flynn has resigned. So that’s no Elihu Washburne, but that’s still less than a month if you count from the inauguration.
I think the more usual situation is the acting official is replaced when their replacement is confirmed. So normally, Yates would have stayed on as acting Attorney General until February 9 when Sessions took over as Attorney General and then stayed on as Deputy Attorney General (her official title) until Rod Rosenstein took over that job. Instead, President Trump fired Yates and had to appoint Dana Boente (who was the US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia) to the acting Attorney General position until Sessions took over.
Sure. But someone acting in a cabinet office position, which is what the OP asks about, is removed from the cabinet office position when they cease to act in it, even if they remain in, or return to, a non-cabinet level post.
If the OP excludes removals by reason of death or incapacity, I think it makes sense also to exclude removes of acting officers, since right from the get-go they’re only acting temporarily and their tenure is always expected to be of very short duration. In another thread there was a quibble over whether they should be regarded as holding a cabinet post at all, since they are never confirmed by the Senate and its entirely possible that the cabinet may never meet, or function as a cabinet, while they are acting in post. But, without getting into semantic quibbles like that, I think it’s fair to say that a change of mind about who will act in post pending appointment and confirmation of a cabinet officer is not the same kind of “firing” as actually firing an appointed, confirmed cabinet officer.
UDS has it right. It has to be the sitting president’s choice for the job.
Sometimes cabinet officers are held over in their post–example, Norman Mineta as Transportation Secretary who stayed on from Clinton to Bush. If Bush had announced he was keeping Mineta, but then changed his mind and got rid of him in a couple weeks, I’d count that too (he didn’t, though).
I understand what you’re saying. But that’s not what happened to Yates. She was not removed from an acting position because her replacement took over. She was fired and a new person was put in the job as acting AG until the fulltime AG took over.
Because Obama continued, and expanded, George W.'s anti-terror / intelligence program, he kept Robert Gates as Sec Def and recalled Bush administration Rendition Specialist John O. Brennan as personal counter-terrorism adviser, basically the Drone Consigliere.
I realise that. But I’m suggesting that the removal in any context of someone who is temporarily acting-in-post is not really on all fours with the dismissal of a nominated, confirmed cabinet officer.
This raises a question for me: where do Acting Secretaries come from? The Cabinet resigns effective 12pm on January 20th, the Acting Secretaries take over immediately at that point.
There’s even a legal theory that the “designated survivor” is unnecessary because the line of succession includes Acting Secretaries (in their opinion), and, as such, the line would never go past State, who would assume the role the second that the Secretary passes away.
So where do they come from? Are they named by the President? The transition team? The outgoing Secretary? Chosen by seniority?
For the “designated survivor” theory to be true, it’d seem to me that they couldn’t be named by the President after the fact.
The Vacancies Act governs the appointment of officers to open positions that are normally presidentially appointed. The law generally directs that the first deputy to the vacant position (e.g., the Deputy Secretary of State is presumed to take over for the Secretary of State; the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs takes over for the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, and so on down the line) assumes the position.
The law also allows for the President, and only the President, to appoint someone else to an acting position. There are various restrictions on who may be appointed to an acting position, in order to prevent the President from evading the advice and consent of the Senate for a permanent appointee.
There’s a chain of command. In the Department of Justice, the top four officials are the Attorney General, the Deputy Attorney General, the Associate Attorney General, and the Solicitor General. At the time the Obama administration ended the people who held these posts were Loretta Lynch, Sally Yates, Stuart Delery, and Ian Gershengorn.
Lynch, Delery, and Gershengorn all resigned on January 20. Yates stayed on as Deputy Attorney General and became the acting Attorney General.
Yates was fired on January 30. The offices of Attorney General, Associate Attorney General, and Solicitor General were still vacant at the time so they couldn’t step in as acting Attorney General. The next level down are the United States Attorneys who cover various districts. President Trump chose Dana Boente to become the acting Attorney General until Jeff Sessions was confirmed and assumed the position.
Rule 34!
Now my question is who’s obligated to resign?
My area of expertise is NASA–there, the Deputy Administrator, which is a role that requires Senate confirmation, shares the Administrator’s obligation to resign.
I don’t know how other departments are structured, and, obviously, someone has to run things in the interim, but how is it determined who has an obligation to resign and who does not?
I’m pretty sure that the President can request the resignation of anyone in any executive-branch agency (which is almost everything in the government). He won’t generally bother with anyone but the top dogs, but he can.
As a general rule, those who have a non-term presidential appointment (requiring Senate confirmation or not) is generally expected to resign.
Some presidential appointees are selected to carry over for purposes of the transition (such as Yates at DOJ or Bob Work at DOD), but there’s likely more than 1,000 political appointees of various levels and agencies who leave their positions. I’m not sure of the exact number.
In some senior jobs, civil service types will take over the politically appointed jobs until someone new is appointed.
Not certain why the OP asks about the issue of firing a Cabinet officer in regards to Gen. Flynn. The PANSA is not a Cabinet officer, so his resignation doesn’t even count in answer to the question in the OP.
As I said in my first post, I consider the NSA a cabinet-level officer because she chairs a working group of cabinet level officers and presides over “principals meetings,” meaning NSC meetings where the secretary of defense, treasury, state, etc. are present but the president is not. I know the NSA does not require Senate confirmation (IMO she should but that’s a different question), but given the immense power of the position I would say it’s on par.