Answer: As they painstakingly hammered out a U.S. Constitution in the spring and summer of 1787, constitutional delegates toyed with the idea of a presidential advisory body, which would come to be known as the Cabinet. One proposal called for a “privy council” composed of, among others, the president of the Senate, the speaker of the House and the chief justice of the Supreme Court. In the end, however, the delegates couldn’t agree on “who should be on this council—or who should pick them,” according to Richard J. Ellis, a politics professor at Willamette University in Oregon who has authored several books on the American presidency. As a result, the Constitution makes no mention of anything like a Cabinet, instead saying only that the president shall have the power to appoint executive department heads, with the Senate’s approval, and that the president “may require the opinion, in writing,” of these officials. “The framers were of many minds on the question of how to establish an advisory apparatus,” Ellis told HISTORY, “and so took the path of least resistance and left it to be hashed out later. But although no mandate required him to form a Cabinet, President George Washington found the concept useful for soliciting advice on “interesting questions of national importance.” On September 11, 1789, just a few months after taking office, he sent his first nomination—Alexander Hamilton for Secretary of the Treasury—to the Senate, which within minutes unanimously approved the choice. Three more confirmations quickly followed: Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of War Henry Knox and Attorney General Edmund Randolph (the latter of whom, since he worked only part-time for the government
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