Which 15 cabinet positions are considered 'principal officers' under the 25th Amendment?
Executive summary
The 25th Amendment’s Section 4 refers to the “principal officers of the executive departments,” a phrase long understood to mean the heads of the executive departments enumerated in federal statute — the 15 Cabinet-level positions codified at 5 U.S.C. §101 — who, together with the vice president, could vote to declare the president unable to discharge the office’s powers and duties [1] [2] [3].
1. What the phrase “principal officers” legally points to
Scholars, the Congressional Research Service, and the Constitution Annotated all treat the “principal officers of the executive departments” in Section 4 as the Cabinet secretaries — i.e., the heads of the executive departments identified in federal statute — a reading reflected in Supreme Court dicta and the amendment’s legislative history [1] [3] [4].
2. Why commentators say there are 15 positions
Modern reporting and legal commentary repeatedly describe the relevant group as the current set of 15 Cabinet positions whose existence and rank are set out in federal law (5 U.S.C. §101); thus, contemporary discussion frames Section 4 as requiring a majority of those 15 department heads (or an alternative body Congress could specify) to join the vice president in a Section 4 declaration [5] [6] [7].
3. The acting-officials debate that changes the arithmetic
A crucial unresolved question is whether “acting” department heads count as “principal officers” for a Section 4 vote; some scholars and institutional commentators treat acting heads as able to participate, while others argue acting officials should not be counted because allowing them to vote would enable a president to replace Cabinet members with loyal acting officers and thereby short-circuit the check the Amendment was meant to provide [8] [9] [10].
4. Executive-branch practice and extra additions
Beyond the statutory 15, commentators note that presidents sometimes elevate other officials to Cabinet-level status by executive order (for example, past practice has treated the Administrator of the Small Business Administration and the Director of National Intelligence as Cabinet-level positions in certain administrations), and some analyses flag those officeholders when modeling who would be consulted in practice — but the Amendment’s text points to the statute-based “executive departments” group [8] [7].
5. What reporters and legal sources reliably support — and what they don’t
Multiple authoritative sources converge on the core factual point: Section 4 contemplates the vice president plus a majority of the principal officers of the executive departments (the Cabinet secretaries listed in statute) or an alternative body Congress might create [2] [3] [1]. The materials reviewed, however, do not supply a verbatim, sourced list of the fifteen department titles in this collection; they instead point to 5 U.S.C. §101 as the controlling statutory reference for which departments are “the executive departments” [1] [3]. Therefore, while contemporary coverage and legal practice say “15 cabinet positions,” a definitive, source-cited enumeration of those fifteen office titles was not included in the provided reporting [3] [1].
6. Practical takeaway and unresolved legal fault lines
In practice, then, the operative answer is procedural: the “principal officers” are the heads of the executive departments codified in law — commonly referred to as the 15 Cabinet secretaries — and whether acting heads count is contested and could be dispositive in any real invocation of Section 4, a dispute that legal scholars warn could provoke constitutional confrontation [2] [9] [10].