DELETE, DELETE, DELETE, DELETE

75 Agencies Listed on the Federal Register No Longer Exist

The Trump Administration was only a few minutes old when it was hit with three lawsuits, all concerning the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

The suits were filed before the inauguration ceremony had even concluded and President Trump had signed an executive order establishing DOGE. The suits argue DOGE doesn’t comply with the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), which requires advisory committees to meet certain requirements, like politically balanced membership, publicly accessible meetings, and a public charter.

Later on January 20, Trump signed and released the Executive Order “Establishing and Implementing the President's ‘Department of Government Efficiency.’” The document makes clear that rather than a traditional “advisory committee,” DOGE will instead repurpose an old Obama-era office – U.S. Digital Services – which is housed in the Executive Office of the President.

The scope of DOGE’s task becomes clearer when you peruse the Federal Register – the official journal of the United States government, where all rules and public notices can be found. A staggering 441 different federal agencies are listed; but shockingly, a lot of those agencies are effectively defunct or obsolete; they’ve been subsumed by other entities, renamed, or don’t even exist any longer.

WHERE ARE THE BOOKKEEPERS?

A total of seventy-five agencies listed in the Federal Register are defunct, many for decades!

Thirty-nine of those agencies were temporary commissions, created to study a single issue and produce a report, usually after the end of a year. The Commission on the Future of the United States Aerospace Industry and Twenty-First Century Workforce Commission are two such examples.

Twelve agencies have closed but have had their duties merged with another agency, for example, the Valles Caldera Trust and the Oklahoma City National Memorial Trust, once separate entities, are now integrated into the National Park Service.

More rarely, agencies were terminated by an act of Congress or administrative reshuffling. So went the National Institute for Literacy and the Resolution Trust Corporation.

Record keeping within the Federal Register, which is supposed to be the definitive guide to government policy, is shockingly bad. Not only are agencies listed that are long-defunct, but records of those agencies are often not updated, so members of the public must conduct deep research to ascertain the composition of their own government.

Just as different parts of government will report different total personnel counts or payroll figures, different parts of the federal government don’t have a shared understanding of how many agencies are active, what they’re currently named, and what they’re doing, if anything. If the federal government were a book, there’s no usable table of contents for the average American to find what they’re seeking.

As Open the Books researchers dutifully sort through the records to determine which agencies still exist and how much those that do are costing the American taxpayers, it’s become clear there’s an opportunity to untangle this web in a public database.

By cataloguing every federal agency, it will create a clearer picture of the government as it stands. Where are the ghost agencies that can be deleted? Where is there duplication? Bloat? For DOGE to be as effective as possible, it’s necessary to have the best possible understanding of the status quo as of 2024.

Open the Books will periodically release a list of agencies our auditors have studied, charting their growth, expense and activity over time. Are taxpayers getting their money’s worth? Are they getting anything at all? Regardless of your affiliation, it’s in everyone’s interest to open the books together and find out.

LIST #1: DELETE THE OBSOLETE

These are the 75 agencies we identified on the Federal Register that are defunct. If we can’t keep tabs of these in DC’s official record book, how will we ever get to a leaner, more effective government?

THE CASE RACE

The lawsuits against DOGE seek to block its savings mission by claiming it violates FACA. But President Trump’s issue of Executive Order “Establishing and Implementing the President's ‘Department of Government Efficiency’” addresses that.

By repurposing U.S. Digital Services (USDS), which is already part of the Office of Managment and Budget, DOGE does not need to follow the regulations of an outside advisory committee. Nor does it require the steps needed to create a new federal agency from scratch.

BACKGROUND: USDS was created in the wake of the disastrous Healthcare.gov roll-out after Congress passed the Affordable Care Act. The website, where people were supposed to sign up for their new health care plans, was practically unusable.

USDS recruits people from the tech sector to do “civic tours of duty” while paired with civil servants to solve technical issues and modernize government websites and databases. The new EO directs USDS—which will swap “Digital” to “DOGE” in its official name—to continue that mission by improving “the quality and efficiency of government-wide software, network infrastructure, and information technology systems.”

Further, the EO directs USDS to create the “U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization,” which would be “dedicated to advancing the President’s 18-month DOGE agenda,” terminating on July 4, 2026. Four-person strong “DOGE Teams” will be assigned to each government agency to advise and coordinate on the “DOGE agenda.”

PLAINTIFF IS A DEI AWARDEE!

Notably, one of the plaintiffs in one of the lawsuits, the American Public Health Association, is also a federal grantee. Last year the organization received two multi-million-dollar grants. One, worth $4.2 million, is to “help non-profit organizations build their capacity related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility and facilitate efforts to infuse health equity concepts into their public health prevention efforts.” Another, worth $2.7 million is also to help “community-based organizations” use “policies and practices that center diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” in their work. Both grants may now be at risk as the administration seeks to cancel DEI-related spending.

Stay tuned to Open the Books as we provided status updates to all remaining 366 agencies in the Federal Register that are receiving federal funds.