Federal Security Agency FSA

By the late 1930s the New Deal had created a sprawl of social programs scattered across the government. Acting on the Brownlow Committee's recommendations, President Franklin Roosevelt's Reorganization Plan No. 1 of 1939, effective July 1, 1939, grouped many of them into a new Federal Security Agency, a large independent agency led by an Administrator rather than a cabinet Secretary.

The FSA brought together the Social Security Board, the Public Health Service from the Treasury, the Office of Education from the Interior Department, the U.S. Employment Service, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the National Youth Administration, and in 1940 it added the Food and Drug Administration from the Agriculture Department. During World War II it coordinated health and welfare services for war production areas and military communities. Its aim was to give the federal government a single home for programs promoting economic security, health, and education.

President Harry Truman tried several times to make the FSA a cabinet department, but Congress rejected the plans in 1949 and 1950, partly because of opposition to his proposal for national health insurance. President Dwight Eisenhower succeeded with Reorganization Plan No. 1 of 1953, which converted the agency into the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare on April 11, 1953. Historians see the FSA as the institutional bridge between the New Deal's emergency programs and the permanent social welfare departments that followed.