11 Defunct Federal Agencies

The multitude of agencies of the U.S. federal government has been called “alphabet soup” due to its legion of acronyms—think CIA or NASA. These groups are shuffled, reorganized, eliminated or created with every presidential administration. Some are formed in response to a specific event (like the Transportation Security Administration following 9/11), and others are dismantled because they’re no longer necessary or have fallen out of political favor. Here are 11 notable examples of the latter.

1. War Production Board
2. Board of Tea Appeals
3. Office of Technology Assessment
4. Federal Theatre Project 
5. Federal Writers’ Project
6. Committee on Public Information
7. Bureau of Prohibition
8. Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy 
9. U.S. Metric Board
10. Office of Road Inquiry 
11. Freedmen’s Bureau

War Production Board

How do you build 60,000 warplanes in a year, then twice as many the next year, plus enough tanks and guns to take down the Axis Powers? Turn your car and appliance manufacturers into makers of planes and tanks, of course. The War Production Board, established in 1942, did exactly that. The WPB rationed production materials while launching a nationwide scrap recycling program for civilians for ensure demands could be met. At the end of the war in 1945, the WPB changed its name and focus to the Civilian Production Board, which encouraged those same factories—Ford, Chrysler, GM and others—to use their now-larger facilities to begin producing enough cars and refrigerators to meet consumer demand.

Board of Tea Appeals

You don’t have to be a history major to know that tea is kind of a big deal in the U.S. Our fight for independence kicked off with a tea party, and for 99 years, we also had a USDA-selected board of “experts in teas” to taste all imported tea products before allowing their entry into the U.S. Teas that failed the seven-deep taste test were then sent to the Board of Tea Appeals, where a re-tasting and adjudication process would either override or sustain the decision of the tasters. Product that failed the process was either destroyed or exported back to the terrible-tea-growing place from whence it came. The board was founded in 1897 and repealed in 1996.

Office of Technology Assessment

You know what’s handy? Having easy-to-parse reports on scientific studies for members of Congress to read. They’re not rocket surgeons, and those studies can be really, really long.

The government actually had a system in place for providing lawmakers with exactly that: Beginning in 1972, the OTA compiled authoritative, objective reports for Congress on topics of national importance, from addiction to workplace safety. (They’re all archived and online, too.) The agency was dismantled in 1995 under Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” to cut federal spending on supposedly unnecessary programs, but in recent years many prominent climatologists and biologists have petitioned for its reinstatement. Since the early 2000s, agencies like the Government Accountability Office and Congressional Research Service have taken up some of the slack.

Federal Theatre Project 

One of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration divisions aimed to employ actors during the Great Depression, which served both as a means of keeping artsy types fed and sheltered but also ensured that a financially insecure public had some means of entertainment. Additionally, the Federal Theatre Project helped create a wealth of culturally relevant art. Many actors, directors and playwrights were employed by the FTP, including Arthur Miller and Orson Welles. Though the FTP was generally successful, it was defunded in 1939, just four years after its founding, after Congressional leaders argued that the agency’s productions were too overtly political. (One favorite FTP series, called “Living Newspapers,” simply adapted stories from newspaper articles, usually about hot-button issues like income inequity and the rampant threat of syphilis.) 

Federal Writers’ Project

Another division of the Works Progress Administration hired authors, poets, librarians, and researchers to build a comprehensive guide to America, through state and regional travel guides, oral histories, children’s books, and works of fiction. Like the FTP, the FWP was enormously successful in that it accomplished exactly what it was meant to do: keep Americans employed, and create a wealth of informative, entertaining literature for future generations. For $80 a month, the Federal Writers’ Project employed future literary stars like Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and John Steinbeck (where he found the majority of inspiration for The Grapes of Wrath). The program’s demise came in 1939, again because the project was seen as socialist, accusations arising primarily from the project’s truthful representations of minorities and economically disadvantaged groups.

Committee on Public Information

That’s a nice-sounding name, right? Public information is good. But the CPI was a bit less concerned with informing the public than it was with drumming up enthusiasm for the United States’ involvement in World War I. From 1917 through 1919, committee chairman George Creel and his team used every available medium to call reluctant Americans to action. As Creel described it, the CPI created “propaganda in the true sense of the word, meaning the ‘propagation of faith.’” The agency used radio, newspapers, telegraph and movies, and even hired spokespeople to chat with civilians at social events to spread a positive spin on the war, but the most successful campaign was the “I Want You” image of Uncle Sam for the U.S. Army, surely the most famous government-sponsored poster of all time.

Bureau of Prohibition

Ratified in 1919, the Eighteenth Amendment banned the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcohol in the U.S. Even though the amendment was popular enough to be approved by a majority of states, it overburdened the legal system by making criminals of just about everyone overnight. The Bureau of Prohibition was formed to manage the massive black market alcohol trade; its Prohibition agents, most famously the untouchable Eliot Ness, spent the next 13 years tracking down and burning barrels of moonshine, arresting people, busting up speakeasies, and generally being huge buzzkills. After the Twenty-First Amendment repealed the Eighteenth, the bureau was partially disbanded and renamed the Alcohol Tax Unit, then absorbed by the ATF.

Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy 

Before we had the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, we had a guy named Clinton Hart Merriam, the first director of the Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy. In 1885, Merriam was tasked with tracking and supporting populations of birds and mammals with economic value, i.e., animals hunted for sport and those that prevent pests. But Merriam was less interested in the “support” part of his job and focused largely on field studies. He was smart, too, and eventually increased his budget from $5000 to $27,000 by convincing lawmakers that he should also study flora, fauna, and wild game. His fundraising efforts earned a mildly scathing nickname (the “Division of Extravagant Ornithology and Mammalogy”), but Merriam proved to be useful anyway: He was the first to identify and map the spread of invasive species in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.

U.S. Metric Board

President Gerald Ford signed the Metric Conversion Act of 1975 to give federal sanction for the U.S. to convert to using the metric system. Soon after, the U.S. Metric Board was formed, ostensibly to set the metrication process in motion. But the board members couldn’t agree on whether they were supposed to simply encourage use of the metric system, or if they were meant to convert all standard measurements to metric. To help sway Americans young and old to the simpler decimal-based system, the board printed a fascinating 18-page book, which illustrated in black and white that 900 grams of tomatoes are roughly equivalent to 32 ounces of tomatoes. After much waffling and failure to gain traction, the board was disbanded in 1982.

Office of Road Inquiry 

A little-known fact about paved roads is that they weren’t built for cars, but for bicycles. The Office of Road Inquiry was formed in 1893 to look at the pros and cons of paving streets, mostly thanks to pressure from the Good Roads Movement, a small but persistent group of cycling enthusiasts. Bikes were all the rage in the 1890s, but dirt roads were difficult to maintain, and were often full of holes or eroded by weather. The GRM argued that improved roads would facilitate farmers’ transport of goods into cities and increase local economies. The tactic worked, and the Office of Road Inquiry used its modest budget to pave small sections of rural roads in asphalt or cement so local governments could determine whether or not it was worth the effort. It was, and now most streets and roads in the U.S. are paved. The Office of Road Inquiry closed in 1905. 

Freedmen’s Bureau

Abraham Lincoln signed an act creating the Freedmen’s Bureau to assist formerly enslaved people following the end of the Civil War. The Freedmen’s Bureau distributed rations to newly freed people and helped them locate displaced family members, find employment, learn to read, and acquire permanent housing. Despite the bureau’s short lifespan—it was disbanded in 1872 by Ulysses S. Grant—its legacy of education and empowerment influences the 100-plus Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the U.S. today.

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A version of this story was published in 2013; it has been updated for 2025.