On March 10, the Trump administration selected Scott Gottlieb to be the next commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The appointment, subject to confirmation by legislators, has comforted many in industry, who were worried that Trump would name an outsider bent on completely disrupting the agency.

The presidential cabinet has long been neglected by political scientists and political historians. The former tend to dismiss the cabinet as a noninstitution that has never transcended its lack of constitutional foundation; the latter have generally ignored it. Focusing on the progressive era, and upon one of Woodrow Wilson's most prominent cabinet secretaries, this article argues for a reconsideration of the presidential cabinet and its individual members as important policy and political actors during a time of increasing federal government competency but as yet unformed White House executive agencies and staff.

This article studies the political credentials of the women and men nominated to serve as departmental executives, assessing the extent to which women have been marginalized in the president's cabinet. Although gender differences within cabinets of the modern presidency vary widely, they range along a continuum from gender resegregation to gender desegregation to gender integration. The cabinet is shown to have undergone gender desegregation, and sometimes gender resegregation, prior to the Bill Clinton administration, when there was a slight but significant shift toward gender integration. This increased during the George W. Bush years. Initial cabinet appointments by Barack Obama suggest that gender integration will continue, and even accelerate, in this administration.