The Public Works Administration was a New Deal agency that spent $3.3 billion in federal money between 1933 and 1939 to finance more than 34,000 large construction projects across the United States, including schools, hospitals, bridges, dams, courthouses, sewage systems, and even Navy warships.1National Archives. National Industrial Recovery Act (1933) Rather than hiring workers itself, the PWA awarded grants and loans to state and local governments, which then contracted the work out to private firms.
How the Agency Was Set Up
Congress authorized the PWA on June 16, 1933, through Title II of the National Industrial Recovery Act, which directed the President to create a “Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works.”1National Archives. National Industrial Recovery Act (1933) Franklin D. Roosevelt put his Secretary of the Interior, Harold L. Ickes, in charge. Ickes ran the agency for its entire independent existence, from 1933 until 1939.2Encyclopaedia Britannica. Harold L. Ickes
The initial $3.3 billion appropriation was equivalent to roughly 5.9 percent of the entire U.S. gross domestic product that year.3Project MUSE. Reconstructing the New Deal That money did not build anything directly. It flowed as grants and loans to cities, counties, states, and other public bodies, which hired private contractors through competitive bidding. Those contractors then recruited workers from the open labor market rather than from relief rolls, a distinction that would matter later when comparing the PWA to its better-known cousin, the Works Progress Administration.
Ickes earned the nickname “Honest Harold” for his obsessive vetting of every application. Each proposal had to demonstrate economic soundness and lasting public benefit. The process required detailed cost estimates and multiple layers of review, and it virtually eliminated the corruption and kickbacks that plagued many government programs of the era. The tradeoff was speed. Getting a PWA project from application to groundbreaking could take months, and that delay eventually pushed Roosevelt to create a faster-moving parallel program.
What the PWA Actually Built
The PWA funded projects in 3,068 of the country’s 3,071 counties.3Project MUSE. Reconstructing the New Deal Streets and highways were the single largest category, accounting for roughly a third of all PWA work. The agency also financed waterworks, sewer systems, hospitals, post offices, courthouses, and city halls. During its years of operation, it was responsible for about 70 percent of the nation’s new school buildings and 65 percent of new courthouses, city halls, and sewage treatment plants.
Some of the era’s most recognizable engineering projects carried PWA money. The Grand Coulee Dam in Washington, the Triborough Bridge in New York City, and the completion of the Hoover Dam (then called Boulder Dam) on the Colorado River all drew on PWA funds. Many of those structures remain in daily use, which is what Ickes had in mind when he prioritized durable construction over fast approvals.
At its peak, the agency was consuming roughly half the country’s cement production and about a third of its steel output. That demand kept mines, mills, smelters, and rail lines running at a time when private construction had nearly collapsed.
Warships and Aircraft Carriers
One of the PWA’s less familiar contributions was heavy investment in military shipbuilding. In 1933 the agency allocated $238 million to the Navy for new vessels. By June 1939, PWA money had paid for 60 naval ships, including destroyers, cruisers, submarines, and gunboats. The most consequential were two aircraft carriers, the USS Yorktown (CV-5) and the USS Enterprise (CV-6), whose keels were laid in 1934 with PWA funds. Both took nearly four years to complete. The Enterprise became the most decorated U.S. Navy vessel of World War II, and the Yorktown played a decisive role at the Battle of Midway in 1942.
Public Housing
The PWA also ran one of the first federal public housing programs in American history through its Housing Division. It began with a “limited-dividend” program offering loans to private developers willing to build affordable housing, but only seven projects met the agency’s requirements. The division then shifted to building directly, ultimately completing roughly 21,000 units across 51 projects in 36 cities. That experience shaped the United States Housing Act of 1937, which created a permanent federal public housing program.
Hiring Rules and Civil Rights
Ickes, a former president of the Chicago NAACP chapter, pushed the PWA further on racial inclusion than any other federal agency of the era. He established hiring requirements that Black workers be employed on PWA-funded construction projects in proportion to their share of the local workforce. By 1936, Black workers made up more than 30 percent of the PWA payroll and held more than 15 percent of skilled positions in the program, a share that exceeded Black representation among skilled workers nationally. The policy did not end discrimination in the construction industry, but it established the principle that federal dollars could come with civil rights conditions attached.
Did It Actually Help the Economy?
The economic logic was straightforward. Federal spending on a dam or a school generated paychecks for construction workers, orders for steel producers, and revenue for railroads hauling materials, and each of those flows produced further spending in local economies.
How much lift this actually delivered is contested. Academic research on the multiplier effect of federal grants during the 1930s, including PWA spending, has generally found multipliers hovering around 1.0. Each dollar of federal spending produced roughly one dollar of income rather than the cascading additional activity Roosevelt’s advisors hoped for. Some studies found that federal construction partially crowded out private employment, with government projects competing for the same workers and materials that private firms would have used.
The sharper criticism at the time was about pace. Ickes’s careful review meant PWA projects took so long to approve that they were not providing fast enough relief to millions of unemployed Americans. By 1935, Roosevelt concluded the model was too slow for the emergency and had Harry Hopkins build the Works Progress Administration as a separate agency designed to get people working immediately.
PWA and WPA Are Not the Same Thing
The two agencies are constantly confused, and the differences matter.
- The PWA handled large construction projects costing more than $25,000. The WPA took on smaller work, generally under that threshold, including repair and maintenance.
- The PWA gave grants to public agencies, which contracted with private firms, which hired from the open labor market. The WPA put unemployed people directly on the federal payroll and typically required workers to be certified as needy by local relief agencies.
- A month of employment on a PWA project cost an estimated $330 per worker on average. A month of WPA employment cost about $82, with the federal share at $63.50. The PWA cost far more per job, but its projects were bigger and more durable.
- The PWA’s review process produced lasting infrastructure but moved slowly. The WPA moved fast, sometimes at the expense of project permanence.
The two programs were complementary. The PWA gave the country Grand Coulee Dam and aircraft carriers. The WPA gave it 650,000 miles of roads and a paycheck for families on the edge of starvation.
How It Ended and What Remains
On July 1, 1939, Reorganization Plan No. 1 folded the PWA, along with several other agencies, into a new Federal Works Agency.4GovInfo. Reorganization Plans Ickes lost his role as administrator, and the PWA stopped initiating new projects. Formal liquidation followed under the Second Deficiency Appropriation Act of 1944, with the final wind-down running into 1945.5Office of the Law Revision Counsel. Reorganization Plan No. I of 1939
The physical legacy is still visible. Schools, courthouses, water systems, bridges, and dams built with PWA funds remain in service across the country. The agency showed that the federal government could manage large-scale infrastructure investment without the corruption skeptics predicted. Its hiring requirements, imperfect as they were, established a precedent that federal contracting could carry civil rights conditions. And two aircraft carriers it funded helped win a war that had not yet started when their keels were laid.