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Cabinet members often state that they serve at the pleasure of the President, and the President can fire any Cabinet member at any time, but can the Cabinet members legally and constitutionally ignore anything that the President tells them to do?
It seems that the implication is, that the President nominates someone who will do what the President wants them to do, even if the President can't actually order them to do anything.
Cabinet members often state that they serve at the pleasure of the President, and the President can fire any Cabinet member at any time, but can the Cabinet members legally and Constitutionally ignore anything that the President tells them to do?
They ignore the president's will at their peril, because he can indeed dismiss them, apart from the vice president. For more information, see Wikipedia's article on the Tenure of Office Act.
It seems that the implication is, that the President nominates someone who will do what the President wants them to do, even if the President can't actually order them to do anything.
Why do you think the president can't order them to do anything? On the contrary, the president can order them to do lots of things. That's the essence of serving "at the pleasure of the president." If the president orders something they disagree with, they can resign, refuse to do it and see whether the president will fire them, or do it under protest.
Congress does delegate certain powers directly to various cabinet officers, but since the president retains the ability to dismiss those officers, the president exerts, or at least can exert, a significant degree of control over the conduct of cabinet officers.
See Wikipedia's entry on the Cabinet. The Cabinet consists of the Vice-President, the head of each department of the Executive branch, and assorted non-department-heads who hold cabinet-level positions. They are appointed by the President and confirmed by Congress, and for the most part can be fired by the President at will, but otherwise run their respective departments independent of the White House. The President sets policy and political agendas and can issue executive orders, and cabinet members (as department heads) are expected to comply, but otherwise retain broad latitude to run their departments as they see fit.
This is a standard distributive power model used in most large corporations, where executives are placed in charge of different divisions or projects while a chief executive oversees the corporation as a whole. Each executive is responsible for the performance of his division, and is expected to compete with the other executives and contest with the chief executive for resources and authority. While some chiefs like to surround themselves with toadies and lapdogs, that is generally considered an unhealthy practice.
and he shall nominate
Sep 6, 2021 at 23:47
To illustrate how much power the President wields, the best known example would be the so-called Saturday Night Massacre. Richard Nixon wanted the special prosecutor investigating the Watergate Scandal fired. He asked U.S. Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire him and Richardson resigned rather than comply. Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus was asked to perform the same task and resigned. Finally Robert Bork (US Solicitor General who was third in line) did the deed.
Presidents can unilaterally fire people. Donald Trump fired James Comey, the FBI Director, largely because he felt Comey had betrayed him by stating Trump was under investigation for Russian interference. Jimmy Carter fired six cabinet members in one day. The catch is there's always a political cost to doing so (quote from the last article linked, quote makes reference to the Jonestown massacre)
“I do think people were ready to follow in those first days after the speech,” The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg, who was the lead speechwriter on the address, later recalled. “And then there was the Cabinet Jonestown, and I think that’s where the elites turned definitively against Carter, and that trickled down before too long to everybody else.”
