Agencies That No Longer Exist

Many agencies live on under new names. The Bureau of the Budget became the Office of Management and Budget in 1970. The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare became Health and Human Services in 1980 when Education became a separate department. The Civil Service Commission was replaced in 1979 by three agencies, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service was split in 2003 into three Homeland Security agencies. The U.S. Information Agency was merged into the State Department in 1999, and the Office of Economic Opportunity, the hub of the War on Poverty, was dissolved in 1981.

Emergencies produced some of the largest temporary agencies in American history. The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration employed millions during the Depression and were closed during World War II. The War Production Board directed industry from 1942 to 1945, and the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime intelligence agency, was dissolved in 1945, with many of its functions later passing to the CIA. The Federal Radio Commission gave way to the Federal Communications Commission in 1934, and the Federal Security Agency became the core of a new Cabinet department in 1953.

Two of the original executive departments no longer exist. The War Department, created in 1789, became the Department of the Army in 1947 as the armed services were unified under what became the Department of Defense. The Post Office Department, a Cabinet department from 1829, became the self-funding U.S. Postal Service in 1971. The Freedmen's Bureau aided formerly enslaved people from 1865 until Congress let it expire in 1872, and the Customs Service, founded in 1789, collected most federal revenue for more than a century.

The deregulation movement of the 1970s and 1980s ended several regulators. The Civil Aeronautics Board, which set airline routes and fares, closed in 1985 after the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, and the Interstate Commerce Commission, the first independent regulatory commission, was abolished in 1995. The Atomic Energy Commission was split in 1974 to separate promotion of nuclear power from its regulation. The Minerals Management Service was broken up in 2010 after the Deepwater Horizon disaster exposed conflicts between collecting royalties and enforcing safety.

Congress creates most agencies by statute and can abolish, merge, or rename them by statute. From 1932 to 1984, reorganization acts also let Presidents submit plans to restructure agencies, which took effect unless Congress objected. That is how the EPA and the Office of Management and Budget were created in 1970. Some laws include sunset dates, and agencies also fade when Congress stops funding them, as with the Office of Technology Assessment in 1995.

In 2025 the administration moved to close or sharply shrink several agencies. The U.S. Agency for International Development stopped operating as an independent agency, and its remaining programs were transferred to the State Department on July 1, 2025. Executive orders directed the Department of Education, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and others to reduce to the minimum required by law, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was largely idled. Lawsuits challenged many of these steps. Supporters said the agencies were wasteful or no longer needed, while critics argued that only Congress may abolish agencies it created.