The executive branch is not a unified actor. It is a collection of agencies with different missions, different constituencies, and different institutional interests that must be coordinated toward coherent policy.
The Fragmentation of the Executive Branch
The United States executive branch is, by the standards of comparative government, extraordinarily fragmented — a collection of cabinet departments, independent agencies, regulatory commissions, and interagency bodies, each with its own statutory mission, its own constituency relationships, its own budget, and its own institutional interests that do not automatically align with the interests of the administration as a whole or with the interests of other agencies whose activities bear on the same policy domains. The fragmentation is not an oversight in the constitutional design; it reflects the specific political bargains through which each agency was created, the congressional committee structures that mirror the agency structure and have interests in maintaining it, and the interest group constituencies that have organised around specific agencies and resist the reorganisation that would threaten their institutional access.
The Coordination Mechanisms
The formal coordination mechanisms of the executive branch — the National Security Council, the National Economic Council, the Domestic Policy Council, and the various interagency processes through which policy is coordinated — are the institutional response to the fragmentation that the constitutional structure produces. Their effectiveness varies with the quality of White House coordination, the willingness of agency heads to accept coordination that may constrain their institutional prerogatives, and the depth of the policy expertise available to the coordination mechanisms. The coordination that produces coherent interagency policy is the exception rather than the rule; the coordination failures that produce interagency conflict, duplicative effort, and contradictory policy are the structural baseline.
Executive branch coordination failure is the institutional default, not the exception. The coherent interagency policy that presidents describe as their goal is the result of significant political and institutional effort against the structural centrifugal forces of the executive branch's fragmented design. Understanding this is prerequisite to understanding why so much of what the executive branch announces as policy differs so substantially from what the executive branch actually does.
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