Do We Need a President?

When the Framers wrote the Constitution, they weren’t about to give anyone the kind of arbitrary, unchecked authority which was how the King ran the British government. On the other hand, the group which met in Philadelphia and drafted the document which laid down how the post-colonial, now independent country would be run, they decided that we still required a chief executive who would be responsible for managing public affairs, albeit an executive who would be elected every four years.

When the federal government began functioning in 1789, there were five executive officers responsible for running the whole show: Washington as President, Thomas Jefferson as Secretary of State, Alexander Hamilton as Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Knox as Secretary of War and Edmund Randolph as Attorney General. From 1789 until 1849 the total expenditures of the federal government amounted to less than $1.1 million dollars.

That was then, this is now. And now the Executive branch of the government consists of 14 cabinet-level agencies, hundreds of non-Cabinet agencies and commissions, the total federal workforce numbers just under 3 million and last year the government spent $6.1 trillion to cover all government programs.

Given the size of this operation, and the extent to which many of the government programs are deeply embedded into the daily lives of just about…