U.S. Federal Agency Acronyms

Missed election. Bummer.

I wish I had.

Why do we have so many? So the newspapers have enough scandals to fill up their front pages each day?

They also serve vital purposes to make life better, safer, and more efficient.

pork... like we believe you are an expert. Right.

You sound like the sort of person Donald Trump would appoint to head up one of these agencies, only to discover after taking the job that they do a lot of important things you had no idea about.

15/22 but surprised I knew so many as a non-American. Why do I know these things?

Hollywood?

Boy that was easy. All of them with 2:55 left. I guess I'm just a policy wonk.

It's a libertarian hit list.

Haha! I totally thought to myself as I was doing it "Here's one that needs to go, that one never should have been made, here's another we need to get rid of..."

Or at least cook your pork in the river ;P

All with 1:42. I always was a spy freak. And a conspiracy theorist of sorts. But mainly just a spy freak. And I love EVERYTHING that ends in 'agency'. Especially if it gets an acronym.

Infernal Revenue Service?

I tried that first.

Quiz will be meaningless when trump abolishes all these departments. sigh...

big oof

I think the EPA is about to move into a history quiz...

big oof

From a traveller's perspective NPS, NFS and BLM are missing.

Black Lives Matter is not a federal agency

Not sure if you were being facetious, but I think he meant Bureau of Land Management

Widespread diseases? like what? chlamydia? The CDC, WHO, and many other organizations do tremendous work preventing disease. If not for government intervention we'd still be living in a world with rampant polio, smallpox, and meningitis. Ebola, SARS, bird flu, and Zika would probably all have made it to the USA in large numbers. AIDS cases would still be growing rapidly instead of shrinking.
and while the government can only do so much to prevent natural disasters (effective measures to combat global warming would be a great start! and something only governments can do in a meaningful way), I'm sure the emergency response services that FEMA, etc provide have made quite a big difference to those who benefitted from them.

As for corruption, well, that's a little hard to combat when, instead of having politicians influenced by vile oligarchs, we just cut out the middle man and vote in a vile oligarch as president. Maybe in 2020...

diva: the CDC remained one of the most trusted and effective agencies in the world bar none up until this year when Trump decided to try and destroy it for his own political gain.

Fishbone: Corruption at the federal level happened before, sure, but not on anywhere even approaching the current administration. Not even Harding can hold a candle to Trump in terms of being most corrupt. And I didn't say corruption was new anyway. I said it was novel that we had elected a vile oligarch to be president. And that's something that is more or less unique in history. We have had businessmen presidents.. Bush Jr., Hoover, Harding (all among the worst presidents in US history because this is not the same skill set), but Trump is the first failed businessman who was born rich and had *ZERO* political experience before assuming office, and who was obviously running, by his own admission, for no other reason than branding and to try and enrich himself.

This has nothing at all to do with my opinion of the 2016 election outcome. It's objective fact. And I absolutely can blame Trump for making things worse. He promised to "drain the swamp" and now things are, no exaggeration, at least ten times swampier. EVERY decision he makes is about personal political or financial gain. EVERY one. We have NEVER had a president who was this nakedly, shamelessly, openly corrupt in history. And this opinion is shared by thousands of reputable and well-respected conservatives and lifelong Republicans if you just look for and are open to hearing from them. Look at the number of indictments. Look at the amount of government money spent at Trump properties. Look at the neverending list of conflicts of interest for Trump and everyone in his administration. Look at things he has said or tweeted himself, or the hundreds of accounts coming out by people who worked inside the administration. This is not a political opinion. The numbers don't lie.

Public education campaigns against HIV/AIDS cut that down to minuscule numbers. Free clinics giving out antibiotics and free testing have kept incidence of things like chlamydia and syphilis fairly low. Development and deployment of the HPV vaccine will save thousands of women's lives in the future. Though the number of new cases of some diseases are increasing, mostly chlamydia and gonorrhea, probably among new immigrants and younger people who didn't live through the strong push for condom use in the 80s and are less likely to use them now, it's still less than 1% of the population affected each year. And one very likely culprit for the rise of new cases is decreased funding to state and local STD prevention programs - so, eliminating such programs all together is obviously not the answer.

Had to learn about a lot of these for AP US Government this year.

CTU?

As a non-American, a lot of the departments listed are to do with defence and security rather than social services - is the US federal state a bit militaristic still?

The CIA gathers foreign intelligence, the FBI investigates domestic federal crimes, the NSA handles code breaking and cyber security, Veterans Affairs handles benefits for military veterans like healthcare, the Social Security Administration is like a pension program for retirees and has nothing to do with defense, Homeland Security works in counter-terrorism... all of these agencies have specific missions and several are actually part of the larger Department of Defense. It's not like Americans just like war so much they needed multiple redundant departments for it.