New Deal Agency
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The alphabet agencies, or New Deal agencies, were the
U.S. federal government The federal government of the United States (U.S. federal government or U.S. government) is the Federation#Federal governments, national government of the United States, a federal republic located primarily in North America, composed of 50 ...
agencies created as part of the
New Deal The New Deal was a series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States between 1933 and 1939. Major federal programs agencies included the Civilian Cons ...
of President
Franklin D. Roosevelt Franklin Delano Roosevelt (; ; January 30, 1882April 12, 1945), often referred to by his initials FDR, was an American politician and attorney who served as the 32nd president of the United States from 1933 until his death in 1945. As the ...
. The earliest agencies were created to combat the
Great Depression in the United States In the United States, the Great Depression began with the Wall Street Crash of October 1929 and then spread worldwide. The nadir came in 1931–1933, and recovery came in 1940. The stock market crash marked the beginning of a decade of high un ...
and were established during Roosevelt's first 100 days in office in 1933. In total, at least 69 offices were created during Roosevelt's terms of office as part of the New Deal. Some alphabet agencies were established by Congress, such as the
Tennessee Valley Authority The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is a federally owned electric utility corporation in the United States. TVA's service area covers all of Tennessee, portions of Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky, and small areas of Georgia, North Carolina ...
. Others were established through Roosevelt
executive orders ''Executive Orders'' is a techno-thriller novel, written by Tom Clancy and released on July 1, 1996. It picks up immediately where the final events of ''Debt of Honor'' (1994) left off, and features now-U.S. President Jack Ryan as he tries to d ...
, such as the
Works Progress Administration The Works Progress Administration (WPA; renamed in 1939 as the Work Projects Administration) was an American New Deal agency that employed millions of jobseekers (mostly men who were not formally educated) to carry out public works projects, i ...
and the
Office of Censorship The Office of Censorship was an emergency wartime agency set up by the United States federal government on December 19, 1941 to aid in the censorship of all communications coming into and going out of the United States, including its territories ...
, or were part of larger programs such as the many that belonged to the
Works Progress Administration The Works Progress Administration (WPA; renamed in 1939 as the Work Projects Administration) was an American New Deal agency that employed millions of jobseekers (mostly men who were not formally educated) to carry out public works projects, i ...
. Some of the agencies still exist today, while others have merged with other departments and agencies or were abolished. The agencies were sometimes referred to as
alphabet soup Alphabet soup may refer to: *A common dish made from alphabet pasta *Alphabet soup (linguistics), a metaphor for an abundance of abbreviations or acronyms * Alphabet Soup (ultimate frisbee), a mixed European ultimate frisbee team *Alphabet Soup (ho ...
. Libertarian author
William Safire William Lewis Safire (; Safir; December 17, 1929 – September 27, 2009Safire, William (1986). ''Take My Word for It: More on Language.'' Times Books. . p. 185.) was an American author, columnist, journalist, and presidential speechwriter. He w ...
notes that the phrase "gave color to the charge of excessive bureaucracy." Democrat
Al Smith Alfred Emanuel Smith (December 30, 1873 – October 4, 1944) was an American politician who served four terms as Governor of New York and was the Democratic Party's candidate for president in 1928. The son of an Irish-American mother and a C ...
, who turned against Roosevelt, said his government was “submerged in a bowl of alphabet soup." "Even the Comptroller-General of the United States, who audits the government's accounts, declared he had never heard of some of them."Flynn, John. ''The Roosevelt Myth'', Garden City Books, 1948. While previously all monetary appropriations had been separately passed by
Act of Congress An Act of Congress is a statute enacted by the United States Congress. Acts may apply only to individual entities (called Public and private bills, private laws), or to the general public (Public and private bills, public laws). For a Bill (law) ...
, as part of their
power of the purse The power of the purse is the ability of one group to manipulate and control the actions of another group by withholding funding, or putting stipulations on the use of funds. The power of the purse can be used positively (e.g. awarding extra fund ...
; the
National Industrial Recovery Act The National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 (NIRA) was a US labor law and consumer law passed by the 73rd US Congress to authorize the president to regulate industry for fair wages and prices that would stimulate economic recovery. It also e ...
allowed Roosevelt to allocate $3.3 billion without Congress (as much as had been previously spent by government in ten years time), through executive orders and other means. These powers were used to create many of the alphabet agencies. Other laws were passed allowing the new bureaus to pass their own directives within a wide sphere of authority. Even though the
National Industrial Recovery Act The National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 (NIRA) was a US labor law and consumer law passed by the 73rd US Congress to authorize the president to regulate industry for fair wages and prices that would stimulate economic recovery. It also e ...
was found to be unconstitutional, many of the agencies created under it remained.


Partial list of alphabet agencies

Agencies created between 1933 and 1938 are New Deal Agencies.


In national security

Since the 1990s, the term "alphabet agencies" has been commonly used to describe the agencies of the U.S. national security state. Many are members of the
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, and several were founded or expanded in the aftermath of the
September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks, commonly known as 9/11, were four coordinated suicide terrorist attacks carried out by al-Qaeda against the United States on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. That morning, nineteen terrorists hijacked four commercia ...
. Alphabet agencies in this sense of the term may also be called three-letter agencies, because they often use
three-letter acronym A three-letter acronym (TLA), or three-letter abbreviation, is an abbreviation consisting of three letters. These are usually the initial letters of the words of the phrase abbreviated, and are written in capital letters (upper case); three-lette ...
s.


Cabinet departments

Partial list


Notes

{{New Deal, state=expanded Federal assistance in the United States