There are multiple types of decisions that the attorney-in-fact can be given the power to make, including the power to: 1  Make financial decisions. 2  Make gifts of money. 3  Make health care decisions, including the ability to consent to giving, withholding, or stopping medical treatments, services, or diagnostic procedures.
1 Changes in the second half of the nineteenth century dramatically increased the governmentâs regulatory power. 2  The federal civil service, created by the 1883 Pendleton Civil Service Act, ensured that bureaucrats would be hired on the basis of merit rather than political connections.
At first, it hired private detectives when it needed federal crimes investigated and later rented out investigators from other federal agencies, such as the Secret Service, which was created by the Department of the Treasury in 1865 to investigate counterfeiting.