Considering History: The New Deal and the Crucial Contributions of Federal Workers

This series by American studies professor Ben Railton explores the connections between America’s past and present.

Across the first six weeks of the second Trump administration, one overarching goal has become crystal clear: wide and deep cuts to federal government departments and programs, with a particular emphasis on firing, forcing into resignation, or otherwise eliminating federal employees. Time and again, Elon Musk, his underlings at the unofficial yet powerful Department of Government Efficiency, and their allies have made the case that these hundreds of thousands of federal workers at best represent unnecessary and wasteful expenses and at worst are actively corrupt, and in any case that forcing them out of their positions is a key step for the new administration.

There are many moments across American history that we could look to make precisely the opposite case, to argue for the crucial contributions that federal workers have made to our nation. But none looms larger than the New Deal, the wide and varied array of new programs and policies proposed by the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration to relieve and counter the Great Depression’s effects. While the New Deal featured many different layers, at its heart was a series of programs through which federal workers reshaped America for the better, modeling the best of what these essential employees can contribute to our communities and society.

Almost exactly 90 years ago, in early May 1935, Roosevelt proposed the most sweeping of those federal employment programs, the Works Progress Administration (1935). At its peak in November 1938, the WPA employed nearly 3.5 million Americans, many of whom were involved in the WPA’s countless infrastructure and construction projects. For example, WPA workers built more than 40,000 new buildings — including nearly 6,000 schools, 1,000 libraries, and 325 firehouses — and renovated more than 85,000 existing ones; the majority of the buildings both constructed and renovated by WPA workers remain in use today. While WPA workers had to be 18 years old, the organization also featured a complementary National Youth Administration which offered both work training programs through the Works Project Program and work-study programs through the Student Aid Program.

While the WPA employed the largest number of federal workers (more than 8.5 million over its lifespan), it was complemented by another New Deal construction program that worked on particularly large-scale infrastructure projects: the Public Works Administration (PWA). Between 1933 and 1939 workers for the PWA, which had been created by the National Industrial Recovery Act (1933), worked on more than 34,000 construction projects, including such enduring national landmarks as New York’s Lincoln Tunnel, Cape Cod’s Bourne Bridge, Washington State’s Grand Coulee Dam, airports in more than a dozen major metropolitan areas, and nearly 12,000 street and highway projects. It’s almost impossible to travel a significant distance anywhere in the country without relying on one or more PWA projects, a contribution from these federal workers that is too easy to overlook but that helped produce a more accessible, connected, and modern nation.

The WPA and PWA employed federal workers on projects across the country, but almost as sizeable in scale and certainly as significant in effect was a more localized New Deal program: the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Created by the Tennessee Valley Authority Act (1933), the TVA was intended to help modernize this struggling region of the country, and it did so by employing federal workers in a wide variety of roles: construction workers helping build hydroelectric dams, librarians staffing a new library service, social workers bringing essential support to the region’s communities, and conservation crews fighting forest fires. As with all these programs, the TVA was not without its controversies and critics, all part of the organization’s story as well. But the TVA so successfully helped the region recover and thrive that it has endured to this day as the federal government’s largest regional planning agency and a model for working with agrarian societies around the world.

The TVA’s conservation crews were far from the only New Deal federal workers involved in conservation work. One of the first programs proposed by the newly-inaugurated President Roosevelt, based in part on a New York State program of his known as the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration, was the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). Between 1933 and 1942 the CCC hired more than 3 million unemployed young men (between the ages of 17 and 28) on a variety of programs designed to improve America’s public lands, forests, and parks; eventually a female-centered counterpart, the She-She-She Camps, was also created, thanks to support from First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. The CCC also featured an “Indian Division” which employed thousands of young Native Americans on numerous projects for indigenous communities. Notable alumni of the CCC camps, many of whom testified to the program’s hugely important influence on their lives, include baseball great Stan Musial, NASA pilot Chuck Yeager, Nobel Prize winning agronomist Norman Borlaug, and actors Raymond Burr, Walter Matthau, and Robert Mitchum.

Those actors remind us that a society is defined just as much by its cultural projects as its construction and conservation ones, and the New Deal also employed tens of thousands of cultural federal workers. It did so especially through Federal Project Number One (Fed One), a cultural branch of the WPA which included the Federal Art Project, Federal Music Project, Federal Theatre Project, and Federal Writers’ Project (which also featured the Historical Records Survey). At its peak Fed One employed nearly 40,000 cultural workers, both because (in the words of Commerce Secretary Harry Hopkins) “Hell, they’ve got to eat, too” and because, as the project’s founding principles put it, “the arts, no less than business, agriculture, and labor, are and should be the immediate concern of the ideal commonwealth.”

It’s impossible to sum up the cultural legacies of these programs in a brief space, but to cite just one example: Two of the greatest American novels of the 20^th century, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), were written by authors employed by the Federal Writers’ Project; both books not coincidentally tell hugely powerful Depression-era stories that capture this period as well as any history text could.

I’ll end this brief glimpse into the millions of federal workers employed by the New Deal and their countless contributions to our nation with a particularly pointed program here in 2025: the National Archives and Records Administration. For far too long, every branch of the federal government had sought to maintain its own records, but in 1934 Roosevelt and Congress worked together to rectify that haphazard approach, creating the National Archives and appointing historian and professor R.D.W. Conner as the first Archivist of the United States. For the 90 years since our Archivists and their many colleagues have worked not just to maintain government records, but also and especially to help us remember and engage with our shared histories, including the inspiring stories of their fellow federal workers and all they have meant to our communities and society.