The Executive _Yüan_ is the political organ which includes the ministries, and is therefore roughly analogous to a cabinet, just as the Council of State is in loose parallel to a Privy Council. Together with the Supreme National Defense Council and the Military Affairs Commission, it exercises actual control over the National Government in war time. Its growth involves executive giantism, and atrophy for the remaining _Yüan_. The President (_Yüan-chang_) of the Executive _Yüan_ (_Hsing-chêng Yüan_) is the highest executive officer of the government. This post has not always been held by Chiang K'ai-shek. At various times Wang Ch'ing-wei (now in Nanking) and H. H. K'ung (now Minister of Finance and Vice-President [_Fu-yüan-chang_] of the _Yüan_) have held this office. The Executive _Yüan_ may be compared to a parliamentary cabinet in respect to its relations to the President of the National Government, but it possesses no authority whatever over the Supreme National Defense Council, nor over the Kuomintang C. E. C. and the Kuomintang Congress. It cannot ask for its own dissolution, nor demand the dissolution of the higher policy-making agency whose will it executes.[15] It resembles a cabinet, therefore, in its service as a consultative and unifying agency for the entire executive, but differs in its lack of controlling interdependence with a broad parliament. Again, the _Yüan_ is unique among national executive agencies in the modern world with respect to its division of the task of policy-making and policy-supervising. Most cabinets consist of meetings of the heads of executive ministries or departments, with the chief executive officer presiding, but have no elaborate secretarial or administrative machinery interposed between the cabinet and its direct subordinates (departments or ministries). The Executive _Yüan_ is peculiar in possessing two elaborate staff agencies which handle as much routine work as possible, act as a clearing house for policy and general administration, and pre-digest a maximum of problems. The outline on p. 58 illustrates the difference. [Footnote 15: Wang Shih-chieh, _Pi-chiao Hsien-fa_, cited, p. 671.] All matters short of the most critical moment are referred to one or the other of the two staff organs (_Mi-shu Ch'u_ or Secretariat, under a Secretary-General; and _Chêng-wu Ch'u_, or Office of Political Affairs,[16] under a Director of Political Affairs), which are nominally separate but actually almost fused, with the Director serving as a sort of assistant Secretary-General. All official business (other than crucial matters raised by the members of the Meeting) comes to these agencies, where it is studied, assorted, and usually settled provisionally, pending only formal ratification by the Meeting of the Executive _Yüan_. [Footnote 16: Not to be confused with the Office of Civil Affairs (_Wên-kuan Ch'u_), adjunct to the Council of State, described above.]