The Unbundled Executive

Abstract

This Article articulates and analyzes the possibility of an unbundled executive. The unbundled executive is a plural executive regime in which discrete authority is taken from the President and given exclusively to a directly elected executive official, for example, a directly elected War Executive, Education Executive or Agriculture Executive. We show that a partially unbundled executive is likely to perform better than the completely bundled executive structure attendant in the single executive regime. That is, the standard arguments used to justify a single strong unitary executive in the United States: accountability, energy, uniformity, coordination, and so on, actually justify a specific type of plural executive, not the single executive structure favored in Article II. The thesis is both unusual and controversial in that there has been virtually no serious theoretical challenge to the single executive structure for more than a century.

Keywords: executive, unitary, article II