The U.S. Cabinet
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50 free The U.S. Cabinet trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Cabinet has been meeting since the 1790s, yet the Constitution never mentions it by name. The first president started with a handful of department heads. Today the table seats the leaders of fifteen executive departments, each with its own patch of the federal government, from diplomacy and the armed forces to farms, highways and hospitals. This quiz covers the ground a civics class would, and then some. You will match departments to the agencies they run, pick out the secretaries who made history as firsts, rivals and future presidents, and work through the rules: how members are chosen, what happens when one is fired, and where each stands if the presidency falls vacant. A few questions go to the scandals and resignations that put Cabinet members in the history books for the wrong reasons. It is pitched for students revising American government, teachers who want a ready-made review, and quiz fans who like their politics with a story attached. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the Cabinet member kept at a secret location during the State of the Union address called?
Designated survivor
The designated survivor practice began in the 1950s, when Cold War planners feared a nuclear strike could kill everyone in the line of succession at once.
Q 02Which first Secretary of the Treasury, under George Washington, appears on the ten-dollar bill?
Alexander Hamilton
Alexander Hamilton held the post from 1789 to 1795 and was killed in a pistol duel with Aaron Burr in 1804.
Q 03Which building in Arlington, Virginia, houses the office of the Cabinet secretary who oversees the armed forces?
The Pentagon
The Pentagon was dedicated in January 1943 and has about 6.5 million square feet of floor space, making it one of the largest office buildings in the world.
Q 04Which agency, founded to fight counterfeit money, was part of the Treasury Department until 2003?
Secret Service
The Secret Service began in 1865 chasing forgers and was only asked to protect presidents after William McKinley was assassinated in 1901.
Q 05Which New Deal reformer became the first woman to serve in a U.S. Cabinet, joining in 1933?
Frances Perkins
Frances Perkins stayed in the Cabinet until 1945 and helped design the Social Security Act of 1935.
Q 06Which Cabinet department runs both the National Weather Service and the once-a-decade national census?
Commerce
The Department of Commerce gained the Weather Bureau in 1940, and its early duties included running the nation's lighthouses.
Q 07Which Cabinet department, created in 1977, is responsible for the U.S. military's nuclear weapons program?
Energy
The Department of Energy traces that role to the Atomic Energy Commission, the civilian body set up in 1946 to take over the work of the Manhattan Project.
Q 08Which future president served as George Washington's first Secretary of State before resigning in 1793?
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson came to the job in 1790 straight from Paris, where he had been America's minister to France.
Q 09Whose vote of approval does a president's nominee need before taking office as a Cabinet secretary?
The Senate
The Senate confirms Cabinet nominees by a simple majority, yet a president can dismiss them afterwards at any time without asking its approval.
Q 10Which 1967 addition to the Constitution lets a majority of the Cabinet help declare a president unable to serve?
Twenty-fifth Amendment
The Twenty-fifth Amendment also lets presidents hand over power for a few hours, as George W. Bush did twice before colonoscopies.
Q 11Which Cabinet-level body was created in response to the September 11 attacks, merging 22 federal agencies?
Department of Homeland Security
The Department of Homeland Security followed a White House office that George W. Bush announced right after the attacks, and it began operating in March 2003.
Q 12Which Prague-born diplomat became the first woman to serve as U.S. Secretary of State, in 1997?
Madeleine Albright
Madeleine Albright reached America as an eleven-year-old after the 1948 communist coup in Czechoslovakia and was UN ambassador before her promotion.
Q 13Which Attorney General was appointed at age 35 by his own brother, the president, in 1961?
Q 21Which Cabinet department manages America's national forests and also runs the food assistance program SNAP?
Agriculture
The Department of Agriculture counts the Forest Service as its largest agency, and the forests and grasslands in its care make up about a quarter of all federal land.
Q 22Which president's Cabinet, stocked with men who had run against him, is the subject of the book Team of Rivals?
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln gave three top posts to men he had beaten in 1860, and the Doris Kearns Goodwin book about them became the basis of a Steven Spielberg film.
Q 23Which future president served in the Cabinet through the 1920s under both Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge?
Herbert Hoover
Robert F. Kennedy
Robert F. Kennedy made fighting organized crime and backing civil rights the marks of his tenure, and he was assassinated in 1968.
Q 14Which Cabinet department, nicknamed the Department of Everything Else, runs the National Park Service?
Interior
The Department of the Interior earned the nickname for its sprawl: it also manages most federal land, hundreds of dams and hundreds of wildlife refuges.
Q 15On the civics test taken by people applying for U.S. citizenship, what is the Cabinet's job?
Advises the president
The official answer is that the Cabinet advises the president, who is free to ignore it, since the body has no collective executive powers of its own.
Q 16Which president was impeached in 1868 after trying to remove Secretary of War Edwin Stanton?
Andrew Johnson
Andrew Johnson survived his trial by a single vote, while Stanton barricaded himself inside his office rather than give it up.
Q 17Which former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff became the first Black U.S. Secretary of State, in 2001?
Colin Powell
Colin Powell had been the youngest officer to chair the Joint Chiefs, at 52, and oversaw Operation Desert Storm in that role.
Q 18Which Cabinet department, created in 1870, is led by the Attorney General instead of a secretary?
Justice
The Department of Justice arrived 81 years after its boss: Congress created the office of Attorney General in 1789, long before there was a department to run.
Q 19Which office, first held by Benjamin Franklin in 1775, lost its seat in the Cabinet in 1971?
Postmaster General
The Postmaster General sat in the Cabinet from 1829 until the Post Office Department was reorganised as the independent U.S. Postal Service.
Q 20Which German-born refugee served as both Secretary of State and national security advisor under Richard Nixon?
Henry Kissinger
Henry Kissinger shared the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating a Vietnam ceasefire, an award that sparked controversy.
Herbert Hoover was so active in the job that he was called the under-secretary of all other departments, and he led the response to the great Mississippi flood of 1927.
Q 24Which Secretary of State negotiated the 1867 treaty that bought Alaska from Russia?
William Seward
William Seward had survived being stabbed in the face and neck in his own bed two years earlier, on the night the president was assassinated.
Q 25Which Cabinet department, upgraded from an independent agency in 1989, manages the benefits of the GI Bill?
Veterans Affairs
The Department of Veterans Affairs also runs a nationwide network of medical centers and more than a hundred national cemeteries.
Q 26Which official stands third in the presidential line of succession, immediately ahead of the Secretary of State?
President pro tempore
The president pro tempore was moved ahead of the Cabinet by a 1947 law; for six decades before that, department heads came straight after the vice president.
Q 27What decides the order in which Cabinet secretaries stand in the presidential line of succession?
When each department was created
The order follows when each department was created, which puts State first, and the same rule decides how close each member sits to the president at Cabinet meetings.
Q 28Which former Boston bookseller, the namesake of a famous Kentucky fort, was the first Secretary of War?
Henry Knox
Henry Knox had been chief of artillery in all of George Washington's campaigns, and he held the Cabinet post from 1789 to 1794.
Q 29Which future president of the Confederacy served as Secretary of War under Franklin Pierce in the 1850s?
Jefferson Davis
Jefferson Davis used the post to promote the Gadsden Purchase from Mexico, partly because he wanted a southern route for the new railroad to the Pacific.
Q 30Which armed service sat in the Transportation Department from 1967 until it moved to a new department in 2003?
Coast Guard
The Coast Guard traces its roots to 1790, when Congress created a fleet of revenue cutters for the Treasury, and it stayed in that department until 1967.