This piece originally appeared at State Capacitance.
Government departments can be organized in many ways, and two important ways are subject-matter organization vs functional organization. In a previous post I laid out this distinction and claimed that subject-matter organization was more common in the past, whereas functional organization is more common today.
To illustrate these two types of organization, I contrasted the US Department of Agriculture in the early 1900s with USDA in the mid 1900s. Here I want to sketch out the history of this reorganization in greater detail. What were the steps to reorganizing this department, and when did these steps happen?
There were several major eras of reform. Functional agencies saw a slow growth up through the 1920s, and then grew rapidly during the 1930s. But the real changes were during WWII and immediately after, when the department was reformed along explicitly functional lines.
Reformers argued at length that – in their own words – functional reorganization was essential for greater efficiency. But their arguments were not strong ones. The entire history of USDA reorganization didn’t serve the needs of farmers or bureaucrats so much as it aimed to produce nicer looking org charts.
