Department of Health, Education, and Welfare HEW

The New Deal and World War II left a collection of social programs, including Social Security, the Public Health Service, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Office of Education, gathered since 1939 in a non-cabinet Federal Security Agency. Reorganization Plan No. 1 of 1953, which took effect on April 11, 1953, under President Dwight Eisenhower, turned it into the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, the first new cabinet department since 1913. Its first Secretary, Oveta Culp Hobby, was the second woman to serve in the cabinet.

HEW grew into the largest civilian department in the federal government. It ran Social Security, oversaw the rollout of the Salk polio vaccine in 1955, administered federal aid to schools and colleges under the National Defense Education Act of 1958 and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, and launched Medicare and Medicaid after 1965. Its Office for Civil Rights used the threat of withholding federal funds to push Southern school districts to desegregate under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. By the 1970s its budget was larger than that of most national governments.

As HEW's size and reach grew, critics said it was too vast to manage, and teachers' unions and others pressed for a separate education department. The Department of Education Organization Act, signed on October 17, 1979, created the Department of Education, and on May 4, 1980, the remaining parts of HEW were renamed the Department of Health and Human Services. Supporters of the split said education deserved its own cabinet voice, while opponents then and since have argued that a separate department expanded federal influence over schools, a debate renewed by efforts since 2025 to shrink the Education Department.