When Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933, he promised a “New Deal” for Americans suffering through the Depression. So, he came up with the New Deal.  He set up hundreds of organizations to provide:

• Direct relief (direct help for the unemployed and poor)

• Reform (changes so that such a crisis could not happen again)

• Recovery (bringing the economy back up to normal levels)

The  New Deal Agencies that set up these organizations were:

• The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC)

• Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA)

• Homeowners Loan Corporation (HOLC)

• Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC)

• The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)

• National Youth Administration (NYA)

• Works Progress Administration (WPA)

• Securities & Exchange Commission

• Social Security Administration (SSA)

The FDIC was established by the Banking Act of 1933, a Reform which regulated both investment and commercial banks.

When the stock market crashed in 1929, people panicked and began pulling their money from banks.

Because many banks had invested money in the stock market, many banks ran out of money and became bankrupt.

In addition to providing oversight for banks, the FDIC insured deposits in commercial banks. Initially, the FDIC insured deposits of up to $2,500; today, it insures up to $250,000 per person.

The FDIC is considered successful in increasing people’s confidence about bank deposits.  This agency still exists today.

The AAA was signed in May of 1933 in direct response to the overproduction of agricultural goods. 

The AAA was a Relief law that paid farmers to grow fewer crops by farming fewer acres.

Its purpose was to reduce crop surplus and raise crop value, thereby restoring relative stability to farmers.

The federal government paid the farmers subsidies for leaving some of their fields unused.

This would increase farm prices as common vegetables and other crops were made scarcer.

In 1933, Congress passed the Reform Home Owners Loan Act, which created the HOLC and transformed the way mortgages worked.

The HOLC loaned money at low interest to homeowners who could not meet their mortgage payments.

It was usually used to extend loans from shorter, expensive payments of 15-year loans to lower costs of 30-year loans.

Through its work, it granted long-term mortgages to over a million people who were facing the loss of their homes.

The HOLC stopped lending in June 1936 by the terms of the HOLC Act.

The CCC was established on April 5, 1933, to alleviate the rising unemployment rate in the US and promote environmental goals.

Unemployed, unmarried male citizens aged 18 to 25 were offered employment on environmental projects, such as fighting forest fires and planting trees.

The recovery agency CCC was considered to be successful, employing 3 million men over the program's lifetime.

The TVA was signed into law on May 18, 1933, and established the recovery agency.

In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson built the Wilson Dam, a hydroelectric dam in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, a small town south of the Tennessee River.

It improved the economy of the Deep South by building dams and improving existing ones so that electricity could be brought to the region.

It built dams and power plants on the Tennessee River, which controlled floods and provided a reliable water supply for irrigation, drinking, and recreation.

It covered not just Tennessee but north to Virginia and west to Illinois.

Launched on June 26, 1935, this recovery agency provided job training for unemployed young people and part-time jobs for needy students.

Grants were given to high school and college students in exchange for work.

This allowed young people to continue studying while preventing the pool of unemployed youth from growing.

Second, for those young people who were both unemployed and not in school, the NYA aimed to combine economic relief with on-the-job training in federally funded work projects designed to provide youth with marketable skills for the future

FDR’s executive order created the WPA recovery agency on May 6, 1935, when the unemployment rate had reached 20%.

The WPA provided building and infrastructure jobs to unemployed and unskilled men.

The program was successful in massively expanding the US infrastructure. For instance, by the time the program ended in 1943, the administration had overseen the building of 130 new hospitals, more than 4,000 schools, and 29,000 bridges.

In 1933, the reform agency Securities & Exchange Commission was established as a permanent agency to monitor the stock market and ensure that no fraud or insider trading occurred.

It was created in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash and was designed to prevent such a crash from happening again. 

This agency still exists today.

FDR signed the Social Security Act on August 14, 1935; the SSA established the reform agency

It set up a form of insurance where employers and workers would pay the tax to cover unemployment benefits, old age pensions, programs for the blind, and for children of workers who had died.

This provided a pension for retired workers and their spouses and helped people with health insurance and disabilities. 

This agency still exists today.