The Cabinet Doesn't Have to Look Like This

A Proposal for Executive Structure Built for the 21st Century

Campaign Briefing: Restructuring the Executive — Cabinet Departments and the Modern Presidency

2028 Presidential Campaign of Martin A. Ginsburg, RN

April 1, 2026

I. The Cabinet We Have Is Not the Cabinet We Designed

The American Cabinet was not handed down from the Founders as a fixed institution. It was built incrementally — department by department, across two centuries — in response to crises, political bargains, and the accumulated pressure of a growing nation. Some of what was built was visionary. Much of it was reactive. And a great deal of it was never revisited once the immediate pressure that created it had passed.

The result is what we have today: a Cabinet map that reflects the residue of American political history more than the logic of American governance. Departments whose mandates overlap in ways that serve no one. Agencies that regulate the same activities through different legal authorities, each with its own budget, its own congressional oversight relationship, and its own institutional inertia pulling against coordination. Programs duplicated across multiple Cabinet-level structures, each competing for funding and attention while the public they serve navigates the confusion.

This is not a government that was designed. It is a government that accumulated. And it is time to design it.

II. What a Cabinet Is Supposed to Do

The Cabinet is constitutional machinery. Not ceremonial furniture. Its departments are how the law becomes service — how a statute becomes a benefit check, how a regulation becomes a safety inspection, how a congressional authorization becomes a road or a clinic or a broadband connection in a community that needed one.

When the machinery is well-designed, it works. Citizens know which agency is responsible for what. Congress can provide effective oversight. The President can manage coherently and hold departments accountable for results. When the machinery is a patchwork of historical additions and political compromises, none of that is possible. Accountability diffuses. Costs multiply. Citizens trying to navigate a problem encounter a maze of overlapping jurisdictions and contradictory guidance — and the maze has no exit sign.

III. The Principle Behind a New Map

This campaign proposes to redesign the Cabinet — not to reduce government, but to restructure it around the actual architecture of 21st-century American life.

The organizing principle is function, not history. Each Cabinet department should have a clear, coherent mission. Its authorities should align with that mission. Its resources should serve that mission. And its accountability to Congress, to the President, and to the public should be simple enough that a citizen can understand it without a law degree.

That means some functions currently split across multiple agencies will be unified. It means some organizational structures that made sense in 1953 or 1979 will be retired and replaced with structures that make sense for the problems we are actually facing. It means being willing to say, plainly, that the way things are is not the way things have to be.

IV. What Stays, What Changes, What Gets Built

The core constitutional departments are not in question. State, Treasury, Justice, Defense — their mandates are grounded in the structure of the republic itself, refined by more than two centuries of institutional practice. These are not on the table.

What is in question is the accumulated layer of departments, sub-agencies, and overlapping authorities that grew on top of that core without a coherent organizing strategy. Those are the structures this campaign proposes to rationalize — consolidating where functions overlap, clarifying where missions have drifted from their statutory purpose, and eliminating the redundancy that serves bureaucratic habit rather than public need.

The goal is clarity. A government where every department knows exactly what it is there to do, has the authority and resources to do it, and can be held accountable when it falls short. That is not a radical ambition. It is the basic standard that any well-run institution — in medicine, in the military, in the private sector — would recognize immediately.

V. What You Deserve

You deserve a government you can understand. Not in the sense of following every technical regulation — but in the fundamental sense of knowing who is responsible for what and being able to hold them to it when they fall short.

The current Cabinet structure makes that nearly impossible for most Americans. A redesigned one, built around function and structured for accountability, makes it achievable. Not perfect — government is never perfect. But navigable. And navigable is a standard this government has not reliably met.

The people deserve a government that was designed, not just inherited. This campaign proposes to build it. 

Martin A. Ginsburg, RN

2028 Presidential Campaign of Martin A. Ginsburg, RN