The Department of Commerce

Show Notes

Nia and Aughie tackle the next department, the Department of Commerce. Originally formed as the Department of Commerce and Labor on February 14, 1903, It later separated into two departments.. Aughie covers the vast part of the organization of the Department as well as focusing on the power-grabbing of various Secretaries of Commerce.  

What is Civil Discourse?

This podcast uses government documents to illuminate the workings of the American government, and offer context around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life.

Welcome to Civil Discourse. This podcast will use government documents to illuminate the workings of the American Government and offer contexts around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life. Now your hosts, Nia Rodgers, Public Affairs Librarian and Dr. John Aughenbaugh, Political Science Professor.

N. Rodgers: Hey Aughie.

J. Aughenbaugh: Good morning, Nia. How are you?

N. Rodgers: I'm excellent. How are you?

J. Aughenbaugh: I'm very good. Thank you.

N. Rodgers: I'm excited about our next department and you know why?

J. Aughenbaugh: Why is that?

N. Rodgers: Because it's your favorite department and then the reason I know this is because it shares a name with your favorite's clause in the Constitution and for anybody who's listened for any length of time, they will know that that is the commerce clause. Aughie believes that everything in the universe happens because of the commerce clause. The NASA's looking out with the telescope and the universe is doing all these amazing things because of the Commerce Clause.

J. Aughenbaugh: Let's try to pull the train back into the station, okay?

N. Rodgers: Okay.

J. Aughenbaugh: Now, first of all, it's not necessarily my favorite clause of the US Constitution. It's just that so much of what the federal government can do is rooted in the Commerce Clause.

N. Rodgers: That sounds like wiggle language to me.

J. Aughenbaugh: Well, of course it is because I'm a college professor and I teach constitutional law.

N. Rodgers: I was going to say you're practically a constitutional lawyer, I guess. Wiggle language.

J. Aughenbaugh: But for listeners, our department today is the Department of Commerce. Once again, and this is a running theme throughout these podcast episodes about federal government executive branch departments. There were some things that I learned in doing the research on this department. They just completely and utterly blew my mind.

N. Rodgers: I have a new theory about the development of departments.

J. Aughenbaugh: Okay, what's your new theory?

N. Rodgers: That just occurred to me between last week and this week. Which is they make a new department and they turn it into the kitchen sink. Like previous departments are like, oh, hey, you know what we'd like to get rid of? We'd like to get rid of this thing, put it in a new department,. Give it to the new guy. It's like when you hire the newest person on the team and they have to bring the donuts. We've talked about the Supreme Court, the baby Supreme Court Justice has to get the door whenever somebody knocks on the door.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, during the conference.

N. Rodgers: It's their job until there's a new justice, and then they get to not be. Cavanaugh got a break because he only had to do that for a relatively short period of time.

J. Aughenbaugh: Amy Coney Barrett had even a shorter period of time.

N. Rodgers: But then like some of them did it for 12 years.

J. Aughenbaugh: Steven Breyer did it for over a decade.

N. Rodgers: They're like, dude, can't we just hire a new justice so that I can stop having to get up and get the door every time. That's my theory with departments. My theory with departments is that a president says, we need a Department of Commerce and then everybody else goes, hey, you know what? You would be really good in the Department of Commerce. They look around for the thing they don't want to do anymore and they handed over to commerce. Is my theory even remotely correct?

N. Rodgers: Well, we've seen this with a number of the departments.

N. Rodgers: Right. Every time there's a new one, like interior, we have an interior department, you know what they should take care of.

J. Aughenbaugh: Well, remember the nickname for the department of the Interior for decades was the department of everything else.

N. Rodgers: I think that's just the way we make departments.

J. Aughenbaugh: What is slightly unusual with the Department of Commerce was how a particular secretary of the Department of Commerce actually used it to acquire other unit.

N. Rodgers: See, that's how I would do it. If President Biden tomorrow made a department of the whatever hefty crafty, and they put me in charge of it. I would start looking around at other departments and saying, I want that and I want that and I want that. I would try to take all the good stuff from other departments if I could.

J. Aughenbaugh: You know Nia in the private sector, you would be one of those acquisition and merger czars.

N. Rodgers: If I had the money, I would. I would be Richard Gear from Pretty Woman. I'd be just taking people's companies and breaking them apart, doing all stuff. This department was actually not just commerce, at the beginning it was.

J. Aughenbaugh: Commerce and Labor.

N. Rodgers: That's 19?

J. Aughenbaugh: 1903.

N. Rodgers: Oh, February 14, Valentine's Day. I didn't notice that in your notes until just now.

J. Aughenbaugh: I wondered if you had taken note of that.

N. Rodgers: That's a president going to the nation.

J. Aughenbaugh: Because I checked that with five different sources and then I went to the Department of Commerce's website. All the sources were like this was created on February 14th and I'm like it's like nobody else noticing. It's bizarre that I actually did.

N. Rodgers: Well, unless you're going to make your spouse the department chair, sorry, the secretary of department. That's not very nice Valentine's present. I'm just saying. They didn't last that, like 10 years later they just become the Department of Commerce and Labor gets cut free, which is, we'll be talking about labor later.

J. Aughenbaugh: We will be talking about the Department of Labor.

N. Rodgers: As a separate entity.

J. Aughenbaugh: Separate entity, but a decade later, during the, I believe, Woodrow Wilson administration, they went ahead and separated labor from the Department of Commerce.

N. Rodgers: Labor will be next. Sorry, listeners, labor will be next because there's nothing created between those.1903 they're like, and we have this Commerce and Labor and what fell under it.

J. Aughenbaugh: Well, here's where it gets really interesting in listening to Nia's point. Pretty quickly, the Department of Commerce expanded dramatically. I'm just going to go ahead and give you how the Department of Commerce has accumulated various units over time. This is going to take a couple of minutes, so listeners bear with me. The US Patent and Trademark Office was transferred from interior to commerce and the Federal Employment Stabilization Office existed within the department throughout the Great Depression, but eventually get transferred to the Labor Department.

N. Rodgers: Well, that makes sense. Federal employment stabilization should be under there.

J. Aughenbaugh: Then, here's where things get really strange. The National Weather Service, which used to be entitled The Weather Bureau, gets transferred from the Department of Agriculture to commerce in 1940. The Civil Aeronautics Authority was merged into the department also in 1940.

N. Rodgers: That doesn't make any sense. I'm just going to say the Weather Department being, well, I'm okay maybe it makes a little bit of sense. It makes sense for it to be under agriculture to start with because really farmers and the weather, that's like they care about almost nothing else except their families, God, and the weather, because you can't grow things if you have bad whether. That's huge.

J. Aughenbaugh: Hey listeners, Nia and I both come from families with farming connections and the number of conversations in my family.

N. Rodgers: About the weather.

J. Aughenbaugh: About the weather.

N. Rodgers: Not as a passing the time thing or as a filler space, but an actual conversation. There's not a farmer alive they can't tell you from some ache in their body.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: Weather is coming like. They know these things, they live by this. It's interesting to me that it got moved into commerce, but now that I'm thinking it through with your answer that commerce is everything Nia I don't know why I'm confused. Is that, I can see where it would affect interstate transportation and all that other stuff.

J. Aughenbaugh: But again, think about this. The number of units that get moved into commerce. Many of them would seem to be better fits for the Department of Transportation, which we will talk about later.

N. Rodgers: It doesn't come along for quite a while.

J. Aughenbaugh: For until I think what was it? The 1960s or '70s, so Civil Aeronautics moves into commerce in 1940.

N. Rodgers: Makes sense because that's when you start to get private airplanes.

J. Aughenbaugh: Public roads administration, which used to be part of the Federal Works Agency during the New Deal, gets moved to commerce in '49.

N. Rodgers: That makes sense because it was its own thing. The Federal Works Agency was it's own things, so it wasn't a department level.

J. Aughenbaugh: But should it not be part of the Department of Labor?

N. Rodgers: Yeah, except we don't have that yet. No.

J. Aughenbaugh: We do.

N. Rodgers: '49 we do. This is just the chairs of Commerce saying, and I shall acquire this.

J. Aughenbaugh: It actually flows pretty nicely from a secretary that we're going to spend quite a bit of time on, who really created the culture of the Department of Commerce early on in its history and it continued for decades afterwards.

N. Rodgers: What we're seeing is the result of that of that.

J. Aughenbaugh: Here are some of the other units. The Federal Aviation Agency was created in 1958.

J. Aughenbaugh: The Civil Aeronautics authority was abolished, so you want to talk about the Commerce Department having a really close connection to the airline industry. That's been one of the criticisms of the Commerce Department historically is the Commerce Department is supposed to regulate industries that produce commerce for the United States, but they are way too close.

N. Rodgers: To the airlines.

J. Aughenbaugh: To effectively regulate a lot of these industries.

N. Rodgers: Well, it's like [inaudible], right?

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.

N. Rodgers: [inaudible] attention. That's exactly the word between I need to regulate this, but I also need to encourage this.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

N. Rodgers: They have both missions, in their mission statements. It's to encourage commerce, but also to regulate.

J. Aughenbaugh: 1961, Congress passed the International Travel Act to encourage Americans, again, to go overseas.

N. Rodgers: We'd like you to get out of the country, please, just for vacation. We'd like you to go.

J. Aughenbaugh: But the idea was that if the United States, we would use international travel as a way to promote western democracy around the world.

N. Rodgers: That kids is known as soft power.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, that's soft power, as our colleague, Judy Twigg shared with us in a previous podcast episode. That's soft power, guys. Because we'll send Americans to your country, and they will spend money in your country. In our airline industries, we'll set up routes and our planes will land in your small airfields.

N. Rodgers: And disperse our American citizens to spend American dollars in your local economy.

J. Aughenbaugh: There you go.

N. Rodgers: Which is what keeps some nations and some parts of nations afloat.

J. Aughenbaugh: Okay.

N. Rodgers: It's tourism. I am not sure that Florida would exist without tourism. I'm just putting it out there. Like Orlando, that entire area is just.

J. Aughenbaugh: For years, the Disney Corporation would justify its huge corporate imprint in both Florida and California on the grounds that it was doing more to promote America and American democracy than many federal government agencies.

N. Rodgers: That might not be the worst argument in the world. We can talk about Disney for days.

J. Aughenbaugh: Disney, BlueJeans, McDonald's.

N. Rodgers: Well, oh, my gosh. McDonald's is everywhere. Starbucks now has joined that group.

J. Aughenbaugh: 1960s, as part of President Johnson's Great Society, we saw the creation of the economic development administration, and I want to go ahead and be very clear, guys. In earlier stage in my life, I actually did contract work for the federal government's economic development administration.

N. Rodgers: For disclosure, you like that program? I liked that program. Isn't that one of the things that does rural development?

J. Aughenbaugh: It's huge in rural America.

N. Rodgers: When you get loans in rural America to build a building, isn't it sometimes coming through that?

J. Aughenbaugh: Coming through the federal government's economic development administration, and this is particularly important in rural areas where previous industries are no longer prominent. In coal country or Rust Belt manufacturing areas, how do you convert that local economy into something that will be sustainable for the future, in the EDA, was really important. The Bureau of Public Roads was finally transferred to the Department of Transportation in 1966.

N. Rodgers: 1966 is when we get the department. We're ways out from that department.

J. Aughenbaugh: Here's another kudo, listeners, for former President Richard Nixon. The Minority Business Development Agency was created as a unit within the Department of Commerce at President Nixon's request in 1969.

N. Rodgers: Yeah, Richard Nixon's a hard figure, isn't he? We should talk about him some time in depth because he did so many good things, and he just threw a grenade at it at the end and you're like, oh, man. See, you could've gone down as a great president.

J. Aughenbaugh: He was a paranoia individual, and you're just like, how in one person can you have this dichotomy?

N. Rodgers: Right.

J. Aughenbaugh: How can you go ahead and say that I want to re-establish relationships with communist China because it's not safe for the world for this cold war to continue in the route in pace it was going, but then go ahead and use the IRS to spy on your political enemies?

N. Rodgers: oh, Richard Nixon, and then your last one that you're going to mention here is one of my favorite agencies. I full disclosure since Aughie disclosed his connection. I have no personal connection to them and having worked with them, but I adore them.

J. Aughenbaugh: Oh, hey, the unit that Nia is referencing listeners is NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is what the National Weather Service is a part of, and it has the biggest chunk of the commerce department's budget.

N. Rodgers: Which it should. Because ask anybody in Galveston what it's like to get a hurricane when you don't know what's coming. Galveston was decimated at the turn of the century. In the early 1900s because they had no idea that that hurricane was going to make landfall, and it destroyed Galveston, and now you can tell a hurricane's coming like 10 days out and people can prepare. We can save lives.

J. Aughenbaugh: This is a really good example of how in the United States we take something like NOAA, the National Weather Service and we tie it explicitly to commerce, right?

N. Rodgers: Well, that's true. Shipping and flying and all those other things are affected by.

J. Aughenbaugh: For stuff like hurricane warnings or tornado warnings, many of us would be like, we want to save lives, right?

N. Rodgers: Right.

J. Aughenbaugh: We want to save homes. We want to save schools, hospitals, but the logic.

N. Rodgers: Of the government is we make money with all those things. We should protect the business. Well, that's capitalism.

J. Aughenbaugh: That's capitalism.

N. Rodgers: That's capitalism. Our government is based in protecting capitalism. But I'm going to choose to look at it as protecting lives because that's what I worry about.

J. Aughenbaugh: In listeners, if you want to know how much data NOAA collects, you have to read Michael Lewis's book, The Fifth Risk, because he has an entire chapter about all the data that NOAA collects, and it is just on inspiring the amount of data that NOAA has.

N. Rodgers: The current discussions about the Colorado River and rainfall and all that comes out of NOAA. Well, it comes out of National Weather Service. Excuse me. The historical amount of rain a place gets and tracking over time, whether it's getting that rain or not, that means somebody has to measure it every day. Someone has to measure it and they have to write it down in a little notebook and then put it on a spreadsheet and send it somebody else who crunches all those numbers, so that when the reporter says to you, they've had 42 percent less rainfall than they have in the previous decade. That number is actually based on a real figure from somebody who measured it, and a lot of their work is done by citizen scientists at schools and stuff where they teach kids about weather and they teach kids about rainfall and all that, and they measure and they send those measurements in. Obviously, the kids don't do that.

J. Aughenbaugh: But NOAA has agreements with nations around the world.

N. Rodgers: Right.

J. Aughenbaugh: There is an information sharing that goes on in regards to the collection of weather data. That if we could replicate it with other parts, other policies, we would have a much more peaceful world. Okay?

N. Rodgers: Agreed.

N. Rodgers: It is truly remarkable.

J. Aughenbaugh: The only two real organizations within the federal government that do that on a regular basis that make their network around the world as far as I can tell, are NOAA and NASA, because the space agencies around the world. It was a big deal when Putin pulled Russia out of the International Space Station, because until now we have treated space as a common good, and we have treated whether as a common knowledge thing. We should all know what's going on with the weather, we should all understand what's going on with our atmosphere. Anyway, but you're about to talk to us about the person who acquired or who set up the acquisition mode, the commerce

N. Rodgers: In NEA, much like Richard Nixon, the public figure we're about ready to discuss is another one of those figures that has been widely criticized for one part of his government career. He did so much good in other parts. Who I'm talking about here is Herbert Hoover. Herbert Hoover ran the department in the 1920s.

J. Aughenbaugh: Can we just have a brief moment about a society note? I know we're going off on a brief tangent. Back in the day, presidents seem to have served in other ways in the federal government in addition to serving as president?

N. Rodgers: Yes.

J. Aughenbaugh: Modernly, we don't see as much of that. Now, they serve in the state sometimes as governors or in the senate as senators, but they don't run departments.

N. Rodgers: That's right.

J. Aughenbaugh: The way they did back in the day, but he's not the only one. We've [inaudible] . We have lots of others who have served in these variety of positions. It's like they almost had a training ground of run a department, learn how to be an administrator, learn how to administer something big and sprawling and weird. Like the United States it's big and sprawling and weird. Now we've got a newer paradigm where we're not seeing that as much.

N. Rodgers: I think that's a very fair assessment in regards to the training and background of our presidential candidates and those who end up winning the presidential elections, but it was not unusual throughout the 19th century and for a good chunk of the 20th century that you demonstrated your presidential skills by first running a federal government office.

J. Aughenbaugh: That's exactly it. Thank you. That's exactly the phrase I'm looking for is you demonstrated your ability to run the country by running a smaller subsection of the country and doing it reasonably well. If you could point to that and say, see, I actually have this kind of experience that we're looking for and maybe part of what was attractive about Donald Trump to people was that he had run a corporation.

N. Rodgers: Not withstanding the differences between the private sector and the public sector we've discussed previously.

J. Aughenbaugh: But maybe that's what's attractive to him in part was that people thought, ''Oh, well, he's run a big sprawling thing.''

N. Rodgers: Yeah. The only other proxy that I can see of recent vintage is former governors.

J. Aughenbaugh: George Bush ran Texas and Texas is huge.

N. Rodgers: Bill Clinton ran Arkansas, Jimmy Carter ran Georgia. He was former Governor of Georgia. But this idea of managing a huge department in the executive branch was seen as one of the ways that you could demonstrate to voters that you had the chops to be president. If there was anybody who could say that they had demonstrated an ability to run the federal government executive branch, it was Herbert Hoover. He was appointed the Secretary of Commerce in 1921. Interestingly enough, the president at that time was Harding. Harding gave Hoover a choice. You could either be the Secretary of the Interior or the Secretary of Commerce. Because commerce was a recently created department, the expectation in the Harding administration was that Hoover would pick interior, which, as we discussed before, was huge and was the department of everything else

J. Aughenbaugh: He could have really played around and done lots of stuff.

N. Rodgers: But Hoover picked commerce in part because he was a former business person. But also because Hoover envisioned a commerce department that would be like the hub of the nation's economic growth and stability

J. Aughenbaugh: That makes sense. If you're thinking about the fact that we're a capitalist nation, commerce would be the one that you would think on.

N. Rodgers: His approach to the nation's economy was somewhat unusual in the United States at that time. Scholars refer to it as the third alternative. At the turn of the 20th century, you basically saw two versions of economic systems in Western democracies at that time. In the United States, you had laissez-faire capitalism. Unrestrained capitalism. The alternative which had arisen in some European nations was socialism. Hoover thought that you could split the difference.

J. Aughenbaugh: Really?

N. Rodgers: Yes.

J. Aughenbaugh: He basically said it reflected progressive thought at that time. If you wanted to avoid the bust part of the boom and bust cycles of American capitalism, the government should get involved to smooth the cycle.

N. Rodgers: Super high, super low, super high, super low.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. I mean, if it's a pendulum, you wouldn't get the massive, widely oscillation in the economy from doing really well to "oh, my goodness, we're going to have another."

N. Rodgers: We're in a depression. It's great, it's the '80s. It's bad, it's the '30s and going back and forth.

J. Aughenbaugh: To assist in that effort, Hoover demanded and received from Harding the authority to coordinate economic activities throughout the government.

N. Rodgers: Wow, that's a lot of power.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, and he created sub-departments and committees to regulate everything from manufacturing statistics to air travel. He took units of other departments that other departments would slough off or not ask for a lot of money from Congress to fund because they didn't really like them or didn't really know what they did. Hoover was just like, "Oh yeah, I'll take them."

N. Rodgers: What you're telling me is that Hoover and I are the same person?

J. Aughenbaugh: Oh, goodness, yes.

N. Rodgers: I will acquire out of this group, so did he take them or did he just put his guy in there to be in charge of it, but it was in another department? Because that would also be a good way to infiltrate the other departments.

J. Aughenbaugh: Well, first, Hoover would get permission from the president to either sit in meetings of other departments or allow Hoover to send one of his people to sit in on the meetings. Then they would collect intelligence as to what was going on in those meetings and figure out whether or not those units were actually a priority in those other departments. If they weren't, then Hoover would make a proposal to the president and then he would work his backchannels with members of Congress and say, "Well, if you're concerned about what's going on in this unit in this department, I will make it a priority."

N. Rodgers: He just maneuvered himself into being basically in charge of everything. He is my hero. I did not know Herbert Hoover was my hero.

J. Aughenbaugh: He was the czar of the American economy which makes his behavior as president even more confounding.

N. Rodgers: Yeah, because during the depression as president, we get Hoovervilles.

J. Aughenbaugh: His basic response to the Great Depression was the government cannot intercede directly. The government should encourage industries to do various things but the federal government can't intercede to the extent that what we saw FDR do with the new deal.

N. Rodgers: He didn't believe in nationalization. He's like you've got to let the system try to work.

J. Aughenbaugh: I put it in the research notes, Nia, a couple of examples like when Hoover took over commerce department, no American family had radios. By the time he became president, 10 million American families owned a radio. To encourage Americans to buy radios and to develop that industry, he convinced Congress to pass the Radio Act of 1927, that would allow the government to intervene and abolish radio stations that were deemed non-useful to the public.

N. Rodgers: Pirate radio. There's actually a pirate radio station that was in England that played music that the BBC, I guess or whatever it was, didn't allow to be played. But that's interesting, non-useful to the public. Boy, that's not subjective, is it?

J. Aughenbaugh: Not at all.

N. Rodgers: Oh, my great googly-mooglys. Can you imagine people's parents during the time of Elvis would have said take that off the radio, that's not useful.

J. Aughenbaugh: Well, think about Hoover's role in the Department of Commerce's role in developing air travel in the United States. Prior to the 1920s, air travel was seen as this unusual, very dangerous way to get from point A to point B.

N. Rodgers: It was rather elite.

J. Aughenbaugh: It was extremely expensive.

N. Rodgers: I mean, you and I would never have dreamed of getting on a plane back in the day. It would cost what? You and I would pay now for a first-class ticket to Australia. The modern equivalent would be thousands.

J. Aughenbaugh: It was just beyond the reach of most Americans to be able to use air travel. But what he did was he subsidized companies to make more planes. He had the federal government subsidize the development of emergency landing fields. He routinized safety features at airfields, so things like lights, radio beams.

N. Rodgers: To make it safer to land and travel because that's when most accidents happen are landing and taking off.

J. Aughenbaugh: Then he used some of his commerce department money to encourage farmers to use planes for crop dusting.

N. Rodgers: He ties it to agriculture, nice. He is me. Didn't he do something about inspections, like now we inspect planes where we didn't? When planes first come in for the first 20 years of air travel, it's a wild west industry. There's not any standards for licensing. If you could afford a plane, you could go in one. Didn't he do a lot with this standardizing what we think of now as the boring stuff that the FAA does to keep planes from just falling out of the sky?

J. Aughenbaugh: he did that. He also had a national conference on street and highway safety. Before President Eisenhower in the 1950s, a couple of decades later, comes up with the national highway system.

N. Rodgers: As a defense against Russia.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Hoover was encouraging states and local governments to come up with, if you will, model street construction and layouts so that automobiles, which again, wealthy Americans could own, but most poorer Americans could not. He thought that if you had similar street systems and highway systems across the country, it would be a boon for the automobile.

N. Rodgers: It would be standardized in that way that would make it safer. Also, I'm sure that at some point, he envisioned at least some commerce happening with vehicles. As vehicles during his lifetime became bigger and carried actual materials instead of just people. Because in the beginning they just carried people but after a while, somebody said, hey, if we put a box on this, we can put stuff in the box and carry it from here to the next state over.

J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.

N. Rodgers: You get produce going really early that way and lots of other stuff like that. That's interesting and because he's at the federal level, he can get the states to get them on board.

J. Aughenbaugh: This is the precursor, Nia, to cooperative federalism.

J. Aughenbaugh: Because remember, cooperative federalism arises with FDR and the New Deal. Where the federal government would give direct grants to state and local governments.

N. Rodgers: To do stuff.

J. Aughenbaugh: Hoover.

N. Rodgers: He's laying the groundwork for that.

J. Aughenbaugh: He's laying the groundwork. The difference between Hoover and FDR is that Hoover preferred the more indirect approach whereas FDR would basically just go ahead and throw money at a problem, say to the states, do you want this money? If so, here are the strings and conditions. Hoover would go ahead and say, don't you want better robots. Can't we get a whole bunch of experts. He trusted academics. The Commerce Department employed hundreds of academics from various fields and ask them to accumulate data, which then the Commerce Department would say to a particular industry, we've studied this. This is the best way to go about doing this.

N. Rodgers: If you put bumps in your roads it will slow the cars down and keep people from getting run over. Sorry, just as a brief side note, I'm not entirely sure that listeners are aware there were no street markings for the longest time in the United States. Because cars, peoples, carts, and horses all shared the roads together for quite a long time in our country. Relatively speaking, the automobile was a fad. Like at the beginning it was not seen as a oh, this is going to be our way of life. Little did we know. You're talking about, if you get any standardizing, it'll be safer for everybody in that space because now you're talking about animals, people, and cars altogether.

J. Aughenbaugh: Think about it in terms of automobiles. It was the Commerce Department under Hoover's leadership that came up with the Uniform Vehicle Code to be adopted by states in regards to automobile safety. It was also Hoover's Commerce Department that came up with the model municipal traffic ordinance for adoption by cities.

N. Rodgers: Which cyclists and pedestrians will tell you, is the beginning of the idea that cars are going to be more important than other types of transportation. Which goes to his ideas about commerce and moving comp. If you can get people in vehicles, then that sells vehicles and theoretically allows people to live further away from city centers and there's all stuff that comes out of that good and bad.

J. Aughenbaugh: For younger Americans, if you want to know why multiple generations of Americans have wanted to buy their own homes, you can actually route that in a Commerce Department marketing efforts in the 1920s. He came up with an own your own home campaign as a way to develop the construction industry in the United States.

N. Rodgers: He is like the fairy godfather of industry. I will plink you with my little the one with the star on the end.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, please.

N. Rodgers: Plink, here's the automobiles, plink, here's houses or the real estate industry. Plink, here's all these things where he's trying to.

J. Aughenbaugh: Get this. He convinced United States Steel, which at that time was the largest manufacturer of steel in the world, to adopt an eight-hour workday because his academics studied the making of steel and the effect on steel workers bodies and concluded that an eight hour workday was better for workers bodies which meant that they would be more productive.

N. Rodgers: They would be workers longer. It's not about eight-hour day because it's better for you as a human in terms, well, it is partly better for you as a human. But it's also much more about the industry will be stronger if we make.

J. Aughenbaugh: Nia, you and I did an entire podcast episode about the Colorado River Compact. Hoover was the federal government, if you will, agency head, department head, who pushed for the United States Congress to recognize that compact.

N. Rodgers: Which makes sense when you consider that the Colorado River services seven states and was a huge impact on the commerce of that area. Look at it now. Agriculture is really struggling in the southwest right now. We're seeing agriculture struggle as a business. Then you see him as a president and he really doesn't do.

J. Aughenbaugh: He was only willing to go so far in terms of the governments, if you will, support and intervention. Because to go any further, Hoover like many business elites in the United States at that time, thought that if the federal government went any further, it would be akin to socialism and we're not a socialist country, we're a capitalist country.

N. Rodgers: But you know what it also tells me about Hoover? It tells me that if he had wanted to be a dictator, when he became president, he would have had no trouble doing it. His ability to look across the government and see what he needed to get a hold of in order to do what he wanted to do. We were talking earlier about Nixon who also had that ability to look across the federal government and say, if I pull this string it will affect this thing. Not every president has had that, but Hoover could have been a dictator. We're lucky that he wasn't personality wise power mad.

J. Aughenbaugh: To give you a sense of how well-respected Hoover was even after the fiasco that was his presidential administration, President Truman asked Hoover to lead a commission about how the executive branch of the federal government should be reorganized post-World War II.

N. Rodgers: Really?

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. One of the best-known public administration commissions in the history of the United States was led by Herbert Hoover, The Hoover Commission. There's a couple other things Nia, I wanted to get to.

N. Rodgers: Wait, I want to ask you a brief question.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.

N. Rodgers: Any scandals in Commerce?

J. Aughenbaugh: None while he was the Secretary of Commerce.

N. Rodgers: Really? He did it all clean. Or he hid the body so well no one ever found one.

J. Aughenbaugh: By all accounts he was a very pious, upright, ethical person.

N. Rodgers: That's great. Because at that point we have other scandals going on around.

J. Aughenbaugh: Particularly in the Department of the Interior where the federal government is buying oil leases and then particular individuals within the government were selling the leases.

N. Rodgers: Yeah. Just not good. The organization do you want to.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Again, this is one of the more fascinating things for me.

N. Rodgers: This is the modern organization not all the other stuff.

J. Aughenbaugh: The Modern Commerce Department. The three largest departments in terms of their budget allocation.

N. Rodgers: In terms of the ones you've heard of.

J. Aughenbaugh: NOAA, the National Weather Service, second, Patent and Trademark Office, and then third and this just blows. Anytime I tell people where the Census Bureau is located, they're like it's located in the Department of Commerce. The Census Bureau is in the Department of Commerce and it has a significant portion of the department's budget.

N. Rodgers: I'm going to say something and you're going to say no. But isn't it the only mandated constitutional like whatever else you may do in terms of creating departments or doing anything else, you must count the people. Every 10 years you must have a census.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, that is in Article 1 of the Constitution. Unlike a lot of what's listed in the articles, which talks about the government having the authority to do X. The census is required.

N. Rodgers: It's required because of representation in Congress. You have to know where the people are so that you can apportion the Congress appropriately to have a representation for the folks. Although again, I think that the Congress is probably now a little too small for the number of people we have. But.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. But then the downside is.

N. Rodgers: Then we have more people and more strife and more partisanship. Do we really want that?

J. Aughenbaugh: Pick your poison.

N. Rodgers: The picture at this point it can only get so big like then you'd have to backup way further to get everybody in the picture. I'm just saying. I didn't realize he had done that commission. That's cool.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. But there have been reorganization efforts.

J. Aughenbaugh: Liberals historically have wanted to disband the Commerce Department because particularly with the model created by Herbert Hoover, the Commerce Department gets labeled as promoting corporate welfare. Let's face it. What Hoover did was basically either goose or directly promote particular industries.

Nia Rodgers: As a side note, and just briefly, any president can. Like the organization of the federal government, as you just said, is not in the constitution. A president could say, no more commerce. We're going to have the department of something else and we're going to spread out all the bits and move them around.

J. Aughenbaugh: But if a president wanted to do that, they have to get whose approval?

Nia Rodgers: I'm assuming Congress.

J. Aughenbaugh: Congress.

Nia Rodgers: Which I'm assuming you couldn't get right now for approving everybody getting a cupcake for lunch let alone getting rid of an entire department. Although maybe.

J. Aughenbaugh: But again, this is an example of checks and balances. Just because a president wants to do X, within the executive branch, at some point, the president is going to have to either get the authority or the money from Congress to do it. Right?

Nia Rodgers: Right. Because Congress has to authorize the agency or the department, or the whatever. They would have to authorize the un-departmenting of something.

J. Aughenbaugh: From them, no. Again, it has to originate with Congress.

Nia Rodgers: Okay.

J. Aughenbaugh: For instance, in 2012, Barack Obama, as he was about ready to begin his second term, announced that he wanted to close the Department of Commerce and create a new agency that would include the office of US Trade Representative, as well as the Export Import Bank of the United States. This new agency, what did he want to call it? Focused on trade and exports. He convinced Democratic members of Congress to propose this reorganization, and it went nowhere. When former presidents have tried to reallocate money from departments to other departments, usually Congress will in the next budget cycle punish the department or agency because basically the department or agency didn't do with its money what Congress wanted them to do.

Nia Rodgers: Okay.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. By the way, it's not just Democrats who wanted to get rid of the Department of Commerce.

Nia Rodgers: Are you going to talk about sweet Rick Perry who couldn't remember the name of the three that he wanted to get rid of?

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Rick Perry when he was running for president said he wanted to get rid of three departments: education, commerce, and then he couldn't remember energy.

Nia Rodgers: Wasn't he the secretary of energy?

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. He then became the secretary of energy for the Trump administration.

Nia Rodgers: I'm going to get rid of that agency or I'll be the department head. We could go either way with that really.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.

Nia Rodgers: Wow.

J. Aughenbaugh: By the way, some of Governor Perry's criticisms of commerce have been made by various academics, including the fact that units within the Department of Commerce, it's come and gone rather quickly. Nia, you and I talked about that earlier in the podcast Episode 8. The Economic Development Administration is redundant at the federal level, seen as though nearly all 50 states have their own economic development authority.

Nia Rodgers: Right.

J. Aughenbaugh: Right. Now Nia, you and I both know one of the other reorganization efforts and that is to remove the Census Bureau from the Commerce Department and make it an independent regulatory commission in an attempt to get politics out of the counting of Americans.

Nia Rodgers: Which I would love. I personally support that idea. The difficulty with regulatory commissions is how the commissioners are appointed. It's really hard to take politics out of anything in the American political system because there's complications with that. But the Census Bureau has been used, has been weaponized more than once, and it's extremely unfortunate because the one thing the founders were like, but you all need to do this forever, and we can't seem to get it to not be a source of grumpiness.

J. Aughenbaugh: Who gets counted? How do they get counted?

Nia Rodgers: What questions do they get asked? There's just a lot of long form, short form, all kinds of complications. Then you get something like a pandemic, which is what happened to us this time, and you don't get the final percentages of people that are harder to track down because there's nobody to do the work like you can't go knock on people's doors. It all gets very complicated. You have one thing in your notes that before we go I want to bring up and I remember reading because I read the fifth risk at your recommendation. Donald Trump wanted to privatize.

J. Aughenbaugh: The National Weather Service.

Nia Rodgers: Right. Just in case anybody is wondering, The Weather Channel is a private company.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. It's owned by a private company.

Nia Rodgers: That uses the weather data from the National Weather Service. If anybody here tries to get a cable package with just the weather channel, you have to buy the premium cable package because it's a really expensive premium channel. It's up there with HBO and Cinemax and all those other.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

Nia Rodgers: That's because it's privately owned. He wanted to put the agency into some private ownership. Like the Noah itself.

J. Aughenbaugh: He thought that the government should get out of the weather business, and that there were already private sector companies who could better manage and make money doing so. The work that Noah does.

Nia Rodgers: I'm against that.

J. Aughenbaugh: I'm against that. I'm generally a moderate capitalist, libertarian.

Nia Rodgers: Right. I agree with you. What upsets me is that all humans care about the weather for a variety of reasons. I don't think that should be privatized. Just like I know, there are countries where you have to pay if it rains on your house and you capture the water.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.

Nia Rodgers: You have to pay for rainwater, which it blows my mind because I don't understand that. There are some industries that I'm like, well their privatizing makes sense, that's not an outrageous thing to think about. But the weather freaks me out. I'm like could we not privatize the weather, please? That seems like a bad idea because that means that that company could tell you things or not tell you things. That might be life-altering.

J. Aughenbaugh: Then the company that owns the Weather Channel, the CEO of the company was also a big donor to the Trump presidential campaign. When that became public knowledge, I was just like, I don't want patronage to decide how we go ahead and make a decision about a government agency that does more than just tell us the weather, right?

Nia Rodgers: Right. Keeps these historical statistics and does all these and they do studies all the time about climate. Presidents contemplate all stuff. I want to be clear that I'm not entirely certain how much deep thought any president gives some things that they just say. Because we have presidents all the time who say things like, what we ought to do, we ought to just privatize census or whatever. They say that in an off-the-cuff remark that turns into a giant thing sometimes and maybe that's not always. I don't know. The hot mike thing. We got to get people out of the habit of just talking when they're in front of other people. Because sometimes stuff gets said that it just freaks people out for no reason. But arguing I would like to go on the record and say that we would like know where the stay is of federal agency.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Big thumbs up on there.

Nia Rodgers: Thank you so much. I didn't realize Herbert Hoover was this much of a positive figure and this much of a powerful figure in the Department of Commerce, this is really interesting.

J. Aughenbaugh: This has been one of the joys of doing this series is finding out.

Nia Rodgers: All these cool stuff.

J. Aughenbaugh: Right. I knew he had been the Secretary of Commerce, I just didn't know how he transformed it.

Nia Rodgers: How good he was at it.

J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.

Nia Rodgers: Clearly this was his shining talent moment.

J. Aughenbaugh: Of all the things that he could point to and he did a lot of stuff other than not a really good job as president. He is god of the Great Depression. But of all the stuff that he did, it was pretty impressive.

Nia Rodgers: Cool. Thank you. Next time we will talk about labor.

J. Aughenbaugh: Sounds good. Bye Nia.

Nia Rodgers: Bye Aughie.

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