Which Departments Stay, Which Merge, and What It Saves

The Strategic Logic Behind Cabinet Consolidation

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

2028 Presidential Campaign of Martin A. Ginsburg, RN

April 2, 2026

I. Proposing a New Map Is Easy. Building One Is Work.

Yesterday we made the case for a redesigned Cabinet. Today we do the harder thing: we explain the criteria, show where consolidation makes sense, and project the costs and benefits honestly enough that you can evaluate the proposal rather than simply applaud it.

The American people have been given too many reform proposals that sounded compelling and delivered nothing. Plans that disappeared into committee. Reorganizations that reshuffled titles without changing functions. Efficiency initiatives that produced reports about efficiency rather than efficiency itself. This campaign is not interested in that pattern. We show our work — because a proposal that cannot withstand scrutiny should not be enacted, and one that can withstand it deserves to be.

II. The Criteria for Consolidation

A department is a candidate for consolidation any two or more of the following conditions are true:

1. Functional overlap: when two or more departments administer programs that serve the same population, address the same problem, or regulate the same activity through separate legal authorities. This is not hypothetical — it is the operational reality of the current Cabinet, repeated across dozens of program areas.

2. Jurisdictional confusion: when citizens, states, or regulated entities must navigate multiple agencies to accomplish a single objective. When twelve agencies share some regulatory authority over food safety, or when four departments each have a role in energy policy, accountability disappears. Nobody is fully responsible, so nobody is held fully accountable.

3. Duplicated support infrastructure: when departments maintain entirely separate legal, financial, human resources, and IT operations that could be consolidated without any reduction in mission capacity. These back-office functions consume resources that should be going to programs — to the actual work the agencies were created to do.

III. Where Consolidation Makes the Most Sense

The strongest consolidation cases involve departments with directly overlapping mandates and no coherent reason for the separation other than the historical moment in which each was created.

• Energy and environmental stewardship functions are currently distributed across the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior, and elements of the Department of Agriculture — four separate chains of command, four budgetary structures, four congressional oversight relationships, for what is fundamentally a single national challenge. The fragmentation does not serve the mission. It serves the jurisdictions.

• Labor, workforce development, and education share a similar structural problem. The journey from school to work, from work to retraining, from retraining to new work — this is a continuous experience for American workers, and it is governed by agencies operating on separate timelines with separate funding streams and no coherent coordination requirement. Consolidation does not eliminate the programs. It connects them.

• Housing, community development, and urban and rural infrastructure represent a third cluster where the case for unification is clear. The communities that need these programs most — urban neighborhoods and rural towns alike — should not have to navigate three separate federal structures to access services that serve a single integrated set of needs.

IV. What Consolidation Saves — and What It Doesn't

Direct savings from consolidation come primarily from two sources: consolidation of back-office operations and elimination of duplicated program administration. Infrastructure, legal support, financial management, human resources, and IT systems that currently run in parallel across multiple departments can be unified without any reduction in the front-line services that citizens depend on.

Conservative projections of savings from a full consolidation initiative run to tens of billions of dollars over a decade. More importantly, those savings are structural — they compound over time rather than requiring repeated budget fights to maintain. A leaner administrative layer frees resources for the programs it exists to support.

What consolidation does not save — and this cannot be stated plainly enough — is front-line capacity. The inspectors, the caseworkers, the program administrators, the field staff who actually deliver services to actual people: their capacity is not the target of this reform. The target is the redundant layer above them that has grown without serving them or the public.

V. The Case for Doing This

Every consolidation proposal has opponents. Departments defend their independence. Congressional committees defend their jurisdiction over agencies they have spent years building relationships with. Contractors defend the contracts they hold with the departments they know. This is the institutional physics of structural reform, and it is predictable.

But the American people have a stake in this that outweighs every institutional interest in maintaining the status quo. They pay for all of it — the redundancy, the confusion, the duplicated administration, the programs that serve the bureaucracy rather than the mission. They navigate the confusion when they need help. They absorb the inefficiency in the form of slower services, higher costs, and a government that is harder to hold accountable than it needs to be.

A government designed for clarity, accountability, and results is not a luxury. It is what the people who fund it are owed. We propose to build it.

Martin A. Ginsburg, RN

2028 Presidential Campaign of Martin A. Ginsburg, RN