Every Cabinet Secretary Ever Impeached in US History

Given that Republicans control the House, the resolution has essentially no chance of passing. It is, as everyone involved knows, a political statement more than a legislative vehicle. But it got me thinking: has anyone actually been successfully impeached and removed from a Cabinet post? How often does this even come up?

So I put the team on it. What we found is one of the strangest quirks in American constitutional history. In nearly 240 years of Cabinet government, exactly two Cabinet secretaries have ever been impeached. Both were acquitted. And there are 148 years between them.

Let me walk you through it.

Section 1

The whole picture, one chart

Here is what Cabinet impeachment actually looks like across US history. I've plotted the two completed impeachments in dark red, and the notable impeachment attempts that never made it across the finish line in gold. The sparse nature of the dark red dots is the entire story.

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Section 2 · The original

William W. Belknap, March 2, 1876

The first Cabinet secretary ever impeached was Ulysses S. Grant's Secretary of War, William Worth Belknap. He was a decorated Union Army general who had fought at Shiloh and personally dragged a Confederate colonel off the battlefield at the Battle of Atlanta. He was also, it turned out, running one of the great kickback schemes in American political history.

Here's how it worked. Belknap's second wife, Carita, helped a New York wheeler-dealer named Caleb Marsh get appointed as trading post operator at Fort Sill in what is now Oklahoma. The existing post trader, John Evans, did not actually want to leave. So they cooked up a three-way split: Evans would keep the post, but pay Marsh $12,000 a year in quarterly installments. Marsh would kick half of that back to Carita. Carita died in December 1870 after receiving exactly one payment. Her sister Amanda stepped in to keep the cash flowing. Belknap married Amanda in December 1873, making her his third wife. The payments continued right through all of it. By the time the scheme unraveled in early 1876, Belknap and his family had taken over $20,000 in kickbacks.

For context, Belknap's official salary as Secretary of War was $8,000 a year. He was famous in Washington for throwing lavish Gilded Age parties and dressing his wives in expensive French gowns. People had been asking how he could afford that lifestyle for years.

The five articles and the jurisdiction fight

The House eventually approved five articles of impeachment, all centered on the bribery scheme. The Senate trial began April 5, 1876, with the President Pro Tempore Thomas Ferry presiding. Before any testimony, the senators had to resolve a genuinely novel constitutional question: can you impeach somebody who has already resigned?

Belknap's lawyers argued no. He was a private citizen. The Senate disagreed by a vote of 37-29, ruling that it retained jurisdiction because impeachment conviction carries the secondary penalty of disqualification from future federal office. That vote established what is now constitutional precedent. It is the same precedent that would later be cited during Trump's second impeachment trial in 2021, when he had already left office.

During May, the Senate heard testimony from more than 40 witnesses. Separately, the House's Clymer committee had already taken some of the most explosive testimony in late March and early April, when Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer appeared in Washington to describe the "Indian ring" corruption he had witnessed from Fort Lincoln. Custer implicated not just Belknap but Grant's own brother Orvil, who held interests in three trading posts. By the time the Senate delivered its final verdict on August 1, Custer had been dead at the Little Bighorn for more than a month.

The final tally is one of the more remarkable footnotes in American constitutional history. On every single article, a majority of senators voted guilty. Of the 25 senators voting "not guilty," 22 stated for the record that their vote was about jurisdiction, not innocence. They believed Belknap was guilty; they simply did not think the Senate could constitutionally convict somebody who had already resigned. A shift of five votes would have produced a conviction.

Belknap walked. He was criminally indicted in DC federal court on the same day as his Senate acquittal, but that case was also dismissed (Judge Arthur MacArthur Sr., grandfather of General Douglas MacArthur, threw it out). Belknap returned to practicing law in Washington, remained a celebrated figure in Iowa veterans' circles, and died of a heart attack in 1890.

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Section 3 · The long gap

148 years of near-misses

After Belknap, something strange happened. Nobody got impeached at the Cabinet level for almost a century and a half. That doesn't mean nobody tried. It means that every attempt either died in committee, got withdrawn, or ended when the target resigned before the House could vote.

Here are the notable attempts between Belknap and Mayorkas. This is not every resolution ever filed, but it's the ones that went further than a single member's press release.

I find the 1932 Mellon story particularly instructive. Mellon was under active impeachment investigation in January 1932 after Representative Wright Patman filed articles accusing him of violating conflict-of-interest statutes. Mellon had served as Treasury Secretary across Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover (1921-1932), and Hoover didn't want a sitting Treasury Secretary to become the second Cabinet member ever impeached. So Hoover arranged for Mellon to be named Ambassador to the UK. Mellon resigned effective February 12, 1932, the House investigation became moot, and the whole thing dissolved. No impeachment.

That's the pattern, over and over. Resign before the vote. Accept a different appointment. Wait it out until Congress runs out of time or interest. The structural incentive for a Cabinet officer who senses trouble is always to leave quietly, which is exactly why the list of actual impeachments is so short.

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Section 4 · The second

Alejandro Mayorkas, February 13, 2024

The 148-year gap ended in February 2024. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas became the second Cabinet officer ever impeached, and the first sitting one (Belknap had already resigned).

The charges were categorically different from Belknap's. Mayorkas was not accused of corruption or self-dealing. The two articles alleged that he had "willfully and systematically" refused to enforce immigration law and "breached the public trust" by giving misleading testimony to Congress. Even conservative legal scholars, including Jonathan Turley, questioned whether this amounted to impeachable conduct. The Wall Street Journal editorial board urged Republicans to drop the effort. Former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff, a Republican, wrote an op-ed against it.

It still went through. Barely.

The first House vote failed because three Republicans (Ken Buck, Mike Gallagher, Tom McClintock) substantively joined Democrats in opposing the impeachment. A fourth Republican, Blake Moore of Utah, switched his "yes" vote to "no" at the last minute, a tactical move under House rules that preserved Republicans' ability to bring the resolution back for another try. Majority Leader Steve Scalise was also absent that day receiving cancer treatment. House Republicans came back a week later with Scalise back in the chamber and narrowly pushed it through, 214 to 213. Buck, Gallagher, and McClintock voted against impeachment both times.

Then came the Senate, and this is where Mayorkas's impeachment diverges from every other impeachment in US history. When the articles arrived on April 16, 2024, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer moved to dismiss them as unconstitutional rather than hold a trial. By party-line votes of 51-48 and 51-49, both articles were killed before any arguments were presented. It was the first time in US history that impeachment articles were dismissed without a Senate trial.

How Belknap and Mayorkas actually compare

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Section 5 · The latest attempt

Pete Hegseth, April 15, 2026

Which brings us to this week. The six articles filed by Ansari and colleagues include some of the most serious allegations ever leveled at a Cabinet officer in a formal impeachment resolution. Article 1 accuses Hegseth of participating in an unauthorized war. Article 2 alleges law-of-war violations including the bombing of a girls' school in Minab, Iran, and the "second strike" order on shipwrecked survivors of a Caribbean drug-boat interdiction. Article 3 concerns the mishandling of classified information in the Signal messaging scandal. Articles 4 through 6 cover obstruction, abuse of power, and conduct unbecoming.

The resolution has, let me be honest here, zero chance of advancing in this Congress. House Republicans hold the majority. Speaker Mike Johnson is not going to put it on the floor. Even if it somehow did come to a vote, it would fail. And if by some miracle it passed the House, the Republican Senate would dismiss it the way Schumer's Democrats dismissed Mayorkas in 2024, just in reverse.

That's not a knock on Ansari. It's just the math. And that math is exactly why Cabinet impeachments are so rare.

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Section 6 · The math

Why Cabinet impeachments are so rare

There are three reasons this list is only two names long, and they compound each other.

Reason one: the two-thirds threshold is brutal. To actually convict and remove a Cabinet officer, two thirds of senators present must vote guilty. In modern terms, that means 67 senators (if all 100 vote). No party has held 67 Senate seats since Democrats had 68 after the 1964 election. So any impeachment that proceeds along party lines, which all modern ones do, is mathematically doomed before it starts.

Reason two: the president can just fire them. Impeachment is hard because it's supposed to be. But the president has something much easier available, called firing. Trump has already removed two of his own Cabinet officers in this term alone, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Attorney General Pam Bondi. When a Cabinet officer becomes a political liability to the administration, the usual path is for the White House to quietly push them out. This is the Mellon 1932 playbook, the Daugherty 1924 playbook, the Noem 2026 playbook. You do not need Congress to lose your job if the president doesn't want you.

Reason three: Cabinet officers are rarely the final target. When Congress goes after a Cabinet officer, the real goal is almost always to damage the president. Belknap was a proxy for the scandal-ridden Grant administration. Mayorkas was a proxy for Biden's border policy. Hegseth is a proxy for Trump's conduct of the Iran war. Rather than sustain the political effort of removing a secretary who can just be fired anyway, opposition parties usually prefer to hold oversight hearings, build a public case, and move on to the next election. Impeachment is the nuclear option. It rarely survives a cost-benefit analysis.