Secretary of War

That or ‘Secretary of the Armed Services’. The Department of War encompassed only the Army, The term ‘Secretary of State’, ordinarily used for a state official responsible for publications, charters, registries, &c. seems odd, but the term is so old that changing it might be inapposite. “Secretary of the Interior” is another odd one. In other places, the name is used for the police department or for a department supervising local government, or for a jumble of agencies which do not fit into other departments.
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What would be agreeable is to bust up several extant departments and distribute their contents to the other departments, new departments or the ranks of the stand alone agencies. Assembling the stand-alone agencies into an array of departments and trusteeships might also be advisable. Departments begging to be broken up would include Treasury, Justice, Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, and Energy. Begging to be shut down entirely would be HUD and 6 or 7 agencies within the USDA (which between them account for 90% of the department’s budget).

I read over these comments, I was about to agree with Art.
…Then I got to thinking.
I don’t disagree with Art, yet I began considering what all we have of Departments. Google’s AI says we have 13 federal departments. Thirteen. ..When I was a teen, I would have looked at that, thought ‘Wow! There’s a lot going on there!’, then gone to read a book. If I look over what they do now, I see tons of redundancy. We have far, far too much dependence on nationwide governance. Worse, we have far too much interest in delegating this or that to federal effort, or state, if we can.
Oddly, …much of this happens because our bishops have been …anemic(?)….
So long as the Church casts capitalistic effort as being quasi sinful, ..we won’t see the populace act for our own best interests. We’ll all be too busy placating one or another “overseer”.
I have considered for some time how Energy, Education, Labor, HUD, DoT, many of these departments could be cut back considerably or eliminated entirely.
Department of Education might be one of the most critical to end. So long as the federal government provides Pell grants, ROTC scholarships (ouch!), Perkins Loans, Stafford Loans, and…*gulp*…GI Bill and Post-911 GI Bill, …schools may teach whatever bilge they wish with impunity, even if it goes directly against the best interests of the United States.
So long as people don’t have need to seek an occupation after college that has the ability to pay off loans within a few years, the rot in post-secondary education will continue to fester.
Many other problems exist with federal departments, yet that strikes me as one of the most intrusive and lastingly harmful.

Neither ROTC nor veterans educational benefits are programs run by the Department of Education.
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Don’t imagine the bishops have had a notable influence on the formation of federal agencies and the division of labor between them..
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There are dozens of stand-alone agencies. If you assembled them into departments (and you could), you’d have more departments than you do now. If you broke up some extant departments, you’d also have more.
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I’m not seeing redundancy. Some configurations seem to derive from turf protection by congressional barons.
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The hypertrophy of the federal government (however many departments it has) is attributable to tendencies which emerged during the Roosevelt Administration which were re-inforced during the Johnson Administration and subject only to chewing-gum-and-twine corrections or gradual attrition.
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One was the expansion of the military and adjacent apparati (the Foreign Service, the overseas development apparat, the civilian intelligence agencies); this was largely an external imposition as the World Wars left the United States in a very different position than it occupied in 1914. As is. military spending as a share of gross domestic product is as low as it has been since 1940; ditto the share of the male population in uniform at any one time. Our problem here is the decay in military efficiency as one administration after the other has treated the military as a toy theatre for social fantasies.
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Another was the advent of what was sold as ‘co-operative federalism’ (Roosevelt’s term) or ‘creative federalism’ (Johnson’s), which had the state and local governments conscripted to execute the goals of Congress in the course of generating a financial pipeline. Richard Nixon was the last President who had formulated goals to partially dismantle this mess. Reagan was sympathetic to such an endeavour but concentrated on cutting programs. That whole edifice should be dismantled and replaced with federal revenue sharing according to formulae.
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Another issue has been the abuse of federal spending to puke patronage at the clients of members of Congress.
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Another has been the manufacture of welfare programs which had perverse incentives or were not actuarially sound. The former should be eliminated, the latter modified. The Congress just rejected another effort to put Social Security on more sound footing, even though we are brokety brokety broke broke broke. The federal role in welfare spending should be limited to cash transfers, binder’s insurance, programs for veterans, disaster relief, services and subsidies for niche clientele which fall through the cracks, and some hands-on services in foreign locales.
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Another issue has been the appellate judiciary’s compliant erasure of the distinction between inter-state and intra-state commerce. We have boundaries between our 56 states and territories and a boundary which demarcates at home and abroad. Federal regulation should concern transactions between parties domiciled in different jurisdictions, provision of services specifically for travelers, intramural operations of firms with boots on the ground in multiple jurisdictions, the use and abuse of environmental systems which transcend jurisdictional boundaries, and matters expressly delegated in the Constitution. (One of the more destructive regulatory offensives in that time was the enactment in 1938 of a uniform national minimum wage which was in its value 3x what was prudent for a jurisdiction wherein personal income levels were middling and 5x or 6x that of a poor jurisdiction in the continental United States. Another was Paul Rogers fancy for command-and-control regulation in the realm of environmental improvement).
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Another issue has been the wretched excesses and abuses of federal law enforcement.

The Department of Commerce is a jumble of agencies with disparate missions. Lyndon Johnson had the idea to merge it with the Labor Department, but it had some protector in a gatekeeper position in Congress so nothing was done. Richard Nixon’s proposed reorganization of the federal executive included replacing the Department of Commerce, but Congress refused to act on his proposals. Jimmy Carter’s reorganization plans did not make it a priority and his attention was elsewhere. It’s not diametrically opposed to anyone because it lacks a distinct institutional mission. It has patronage programs (which should be shut down), statistical collection agencies, the weather bureau and allied agencies, &c. The Department of Labor is predominantly but not exclusively a collection of regulatory agencies. You could reconfigure the Department of Labor to be exclusively devoted to regulation with, perhaps a sideline in statistical collection. You could have a replacement for the Department of Commerce which did likewise, sending most of the agencies within the current department elsewhere. The two would not be ‘diametrically opposed’ because they would be concerned with different sorts of transactions – one with relations between producers and between producers and consumers, the other with relations between employers and employees.
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Again, I’m not seeing how Bp. Bernardin’s ‘seamless garment’ babble is supposed to influence how federal agencies are ordered, brass tacks.