extended the influence of the governor into every phase of human life in the commonwealth, well beyond the limitations of executive power envisioned by delegates to the constitutional convention in 1891. By 1934, the executive branch consisted of sixty-nine boards, commissions, and agencies in addition to the constitutional officers, although the members of these commissions were often the constitutional officers themselves. Governor Ruby Laffoon proposed the Administrative Reorganization Act of 1934 to organize these boards and commissions into seventeen executive departments and seven independent agencies. The General Assembly passed this legislation, giving the executive branch some semblance of structure for the first time. Laffoon's successor, A. B. "Happy" Chandler, called a special legislative session in 1936 seeking passage of another reorganization act. This act abolished several commissions and organized those remaining into ten statutory departments: Finance, Revenue, Highways, Health, Welfare, Industrial Relations, Business Regulation, Conservation, Libraries and Archives, and Mines and Minerals. The Act also created the Executive Cabinet, consisting of the constitutional officers and the heads of each of the ten statutory departments. The efficiencies created by Chandler's reorganization allowed him to pay off more than three-quarters of the state's $28.5 million debt. Besides effecting the reorganization of the executive branch, the Reorganization Act of 1936 also explicitly empowered the governor to appoint executive department heads and establish, combine, or divide departments as necessary. Later statutes gave the governor the power to appoint advisory committees on reorganization, appoint deputy heads of divisions, transfer employees and change their responsibilities within the executive branch, and establish general rules of conduct for executive branch members. In the 35 years between the time of Chandler's reorganization and the election of Wendell H. Ford as governor in 1971, the executive branch had again become unwieldy. 60 departments and 210 boards reported directly to the governor by 1972, and duplication of services between departments had created inefficiencies. On January 1, 1973, a plan that Ford had issued in late 1972 took effect, consolidating the departments reporting to him into six program cabinets: Consumer Protection and Regulation, Development, Education and the Arts, Human Resources, Safety and Justice, and Transportation. Ford continued merging departments and reorganizing the executive branch throughout 1973 to the extent that, by the end of the year, there were only three program cabinets (Development, Education and the Arts, and Consumer Protection and Regulation) and four additional departments (Human Resources, Justice, Natural Resources and