Housing & Mobility
HUD + DOT + TSA, with aviation and housing-payment safeguards.
Government capacity · Chapter 26 & Appendix C
Rebuilding the Executive Branch
Administrative fragmentation can create duplicate intake, conflicting missions, and no single owner for results. The book proposes reorganization, but only under statutory transfer maps with explicit continuity and rollback rules.
Chapter 26
Reorganize around missions, but treat continuity as a hard constraint.
The book does not assume that mergers automatically save money. Appendix C estimates one-time transition costs of 1% to 3% of affected components’ annual budgets and assumes no steady-state savings. Every transfer requires a statute, a certified transition plan, and GAO verification before cutover.
Civil Protection & Resilience
FEMA + CISA + Coast Guard + hazard-protection functions.
Immigration & Citizenship
USCIS + CBP + civil ICE functions, with adjudication moved to an independent Article I court.
Industry, Trade & Small Business
Commerce business functions + SBA, with an independent Statistical Administration.
Digital Government & Public Administration
OPM + GSA + procurement and digital-service infrastructure + Public Services Account.
Education & Skills
Education joined with workforce training and apprenticeships while unemployment insurance remains with Labor.
Energy & Climate
DOE expanded as a capacity department; NOAA moves intact to Interior, while EPA, FERC, and NRC remain independent.
Public Integrity Commission
OGE, disclosure administration, and protected whistleblower functions combined with separation between advice, investigation, and enforcement.
Article I Immigration Court
An independent adjudicatory structure that must be operating before immigration-department transfers begin.
Interactive transfer map
Choose an agency to see where it moves and what cannot break.
The map is a digital rendering of Appendix C’s transfer logic. It emphasizes continuity safeguards rather than drawing a simplified org chart.
Agency transfer
Current home
Proposed home
Mission rationale
Continuity safeguards
Legal vehicle:
The proposal in brief
At a glance
Goal
Organize the executive branch around durable missions while making services easier to use and preserving professional administration.
Instrument
Seven rebuilt mission departments; Independent Public Integrity Commission; independent Article I immigration court; statutory transfer maps and certified transition plans.
Transition rule
No payment, benefit, or safety-critical system cuts over until it has run in parallel for at least one full business cycle and an independent tester certifies equivalent or better performance.
Personnel rule
Employees transfer with the function at the same position, grade, pay, tenure, accrued leave, retirement credit, and benefits for at least two years; collective bargaining agreements remain in force through expiration.
Cost
One-time transition costs estimated at 1–3% of affected components’ annual budgets over the transition; no steady-state savings assumed. Author planning estimate.
Rollback
Reorganization commissions may delay transfers; Congress receives an expedited procedure to reverse a transfer within three years.
The Strongest Counterargument & Our Response
Best case against
The strongest objection is that large federal mergers can consume years of management attention, break information systems, disrupt grants and benefits, and create departments too broad for any Secretary to manage. Coordination offices may achieve much of the benefit with less institutional risk.
The author's response
Appendix C treats reorganization as a controlled migration rather than a new org chart on inauguration day: legal authorities continue, contracts and grants remain valid, privacy notices carry over, high-risk systems move last, parallel operation is mandatory, and measurable deterioration automatically halts specified phases.
What remains uncertain
Whether the mission benefits are large enough to justify transition costs cannot be known in advance. The book makes that uncertainty explicit and proposes quarterly performance dashboards and rollback authority rather than assuming the new structure succeeds.