The President as Chief Administrator: James Landis and the Brownlow Report
Is the president the chief administrator? This question has been at the heart of many of the great controversies that have defined us as a nation. Andrew Jackson insisted that he was chief administrator when he ordered William Duane, Secretary of the Treasury, to withdraw federal funds from the Second National Bank in Jackson's campaign to destroy the bank, and then fired him when he refused to comply; but the Senate vigorously rejected pres idential claims to control a discretion vested by law in the Secretary of the Treasury, and it censured Jackson for what it considered usurpations of power. Richard Nixon created a large, hierarchically organized White House staff to ensure his ability to dominate the federal bureaucracy, but when henchman whose personal loyalty exceeded their prudence and law-abidingness at tempted to enlist the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Central Intelligence Agency in schemes of partisan advance ment and obstruction of justice, Nixon found himself facing impeachment. Nixon's efforts to make himself the chief administrator were criticized as manifestations of an imperial presidency. In the contemporary period, pro ponents of executive power have been developing a theory of the unitary executive, asserting that the vesting clause and take care clause in Article II of the Constitution necessarily imply that the president is chief administrator.1 Independently, during the latter period, David Osborne and Ted Gaebler published Reinventing Government and initiated an administrative reform