# Federal Agencies > [!info] Gateway page > Orientation and the taxonomy here. The full map — every tier, the ASCII org charts, the component trees — is at [[Federal Agencies Hub]]. Federal agencies are the departments, bureaus, commissions, and corporations that execute the law: roughly 2.2 million civilian employees across 15 cabinet departments plus dozens of independent bodies. This is the part of government that enforces statutes, writes regulations, runs programs, cuts checks, and collects revenue — the machinery that turns legislation into consequence. ## The taxonomy, and why it is the whole argument Agencies are not interchangeable. Their differences in legal form are exactly what the contemporary fight is about, so the categories are worth holding precisely: **Cabinet departments** — the 15 Article II departments, headed by Senate-confirmed secretaries serving at the President's pleasure. Nobody has ever disputed that these are the President's to direct. See [[Cabinet Departments Hub]]. **Independent executive agencies** — single-headed bodies outside the departments (NASA, EPA, SSA). Independent in the organisational sense, not the removal sense. See [[Independent Executive Agencies Hub]]. **Independent regulatory commissions** — multi-member bodies with staggered terms, statutory party balance, and, until 2026, for-cause removal protection. The [[FTC]], [[SEC]], [[FCC]], [[NLRB]] and dozens more. These were the constitutionally distinctive ones. See [[Independent Regulatory Commissions Hub]]. **Government corporations** — entities Congress structured to operate on business lines. See [[Government Corporations Hub]]. ## What changed in 2026 The third category no longer means what it meant. [[Trump v. Slaughter]] (June 29, 2026) overruled [[Humphrey's Executor v. United States]] and held that the President may remove independent-agency commissioners at will. Statutory party-balance requirements survive as text but not as constraint. The [[Federal Reserve]] is the sole carve-out. A structural feature of American governance dating to the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887 was retired by litigation rather than legislation. Read that alongside the other two vectors and the architecture becomes legible as a single design: - **[[Trump v. Slaughter]]** removes the protection at the top — commissioners. - **[[Schedule F]]** removes it at the bottom — career civil servants reclassified as at-will. - **[[DOGE]]** and the deferred-resignation programmes removed the people in between — the [[IRS]] lost ~30% of its workforce and [[NASA]] ~22% in a single year, with enforcement and engineering functions cut harder than headquarters. [[Project 2025]] is, structurally, the chapter-by-chapter operating manual for that sequence, and [[Unitary Executive Theory]] is the legal claim that authorises it. The vault's interest is less in any single agency's fate than in the pattern: **capture the appointment, remove the protection, defund the capacity.** An agency does not need to be abolished if it cannot afford to act. ## Where to go from here | Destination | What's there | |---|---| | [[Federal Agencies Hub]] | The full map — every tier, with the ASCII structural diagrams | | [[Executive Branch Org Chart]] | The whole branch on one page, President → EOP → departments → components | | [[Cabinet Departments Hub]] · [[Independent Executive Agencies Hub]] · [[Independent Regulatory Commissions Hub]] · [[Government Corporations Hub]] | The four tiers | | [[Intelligence Community Tree]] · [[DHS Component Tree]] · [[Federal Reserve System Tree]] · [[Combatant Commands Map]] | Deep structural maps of the densest sub-trees | | [[Oversight and Accountability Hub]] · [[Inspectors General]] | The watchdog layer, and what happened to it | | [[How an Executive Order Is Issued and Challenged]] | The second term's signature governing instrument, and its three challenge tracks | | [[Trump 2.0 Cabinet Hub]] | Who currently runs what | ## See also [[Congress]] · [[Administrative State]] · [[Unitary Executive Theory]] · [[Project 2025]] · [[Schedule F]] · [[DOGE]] · [[Regulatory Capture]] · [[Power of the Purse]]