Execs without public-sector experience most common in GOP cabinets Business executives with no prior public office or high military trank as percentage of total Cabinet members G.H.W Bush T. Roosevelt
Should all of President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees eventually be confirmed, he will start his administration with one of the most heavily business-oriented Cabinets in U.S. history.
Five of the 15 people Trump has nominated to be Cabinet secretaries have spent all or nearly all their careers in the business world, with no significant public office or senior military service on their résumés. That would be more businesspeople with no public-sector experience than have ever served in the Cabinet at any one time, according to a review and analysis by the Pew Research Center.
Even accounting for the growth of the Cabinet over time, Trump would be in the top tier in terms of the percentage of career businesspeople as Cabinet secretaries. A third of the department heads in the Trump administration (33%) will be people whose prior experience has been entirely in the public sector. Only three other presidents are in the same range: William McKinley (three out eight Cabinet positions, or 37.5%), Ronald Reagan (four out of 13 positions, or 31%), and Dwight Eisenhower (three out of 10 positions, or 30%).
Execs without public-sector experience  | most common in GOP cabinets  | Business executives with no prior public office or  | high military trank as percentage of total Cabinet  | members  | Trump  | 33%  | Obama  | 20  | Republicans  | G W Bush  | Democrats  | Clinton  | G.H.W Bush  | Reagan  | 31  | Carter  | Ford  | 18  | Nixon  | Johnson  | Kennedy  | 10  | Eisenhower  | 30  | Truman  | F. Roosevelt  | 20  | Hoover  | 20  | Coolidge  | 20  | Harding  | 20  | Wilson  | 10  | Taft  | 1.1  | T. Roosevelt  | McKinley  | 38  | Cleveland  | 13  | Hamison  | 13  | Cleveland  | 13  | Arthur  | Garfield  | Hayes  | Grant  | 14  | Note: Assumes all of Donald Trump's announced nominees  | are confirmed. Percentage for each administration is based  | on the maximum number of executives with no prior  | public-sector experience serving at any given time, Before  | the Grant administration, all Cabinet secre taries had held at  | least some public office prior to their nomination.  | Source: Departmental Virginia); biographies; the Miller Center  | (University of Virginia); contemporaneous reports in The New  | York Times: Pew Research Center ana lysis.  | PEW RESEARCH CENTER 