U.S. Federal Agency Acronyms

Missed election. Bummer.

I wish I had.

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

Let’s just agree that both are messes of inefficiency and corruption?

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.

Me too. I really think that should be accepted as a type in for those (all) of us who can't stand typing anything indicating it's a service.

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...

It got very very much worse and more rampant in 2016 and you're blind or ignorant if you don't know that. This has nothing at all to do with "agreeing" with the results of an election...

@divantilya, if there's any group of people to blame for spikes in disease (in particular measles and COVID), it's anti-vaxxers, not the federal government.

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.

It's not nearly as simple. The fact is, just because they don't impossibly destroy the problem, doesn't mean they are doing nothing. Like @kalbahamut said, many of these agencies are completing efficient tasks.

This is like asking why we have traffic fatalities even though we have seatbelts. You can't eliminate bad outcomes, but you can put measures in place to minimize them.

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

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.

Only advantage? Washington DC is probably my favorite city in America and its suburbs are rather nice too. IMO the only bad things about the city are the traffic and the politicians, and the latter is not something people interact with on a regular basis. If you don't like it though, I guess suit yourself.

Why do we have a National Security Agency and a Department of Homeland Security? Isn't that a bit redundant?

Many have gone away or merged with other agencies. QM is some kind of crazy anarchist, who hates any talk of politics and so avoids it all costs leading to some... interesting... opinions on the subject, from what I gather.

How did I get this far in life without knowing the word "cruft"?

Not for HUD!

Also try https://www.jetpunk.com/user-quizzes/1291421/us-cabinet-department-by-federal-agencies if you found this quiz interesting.