Reorganization Act of 1939

The Reorganization Act of 1939, Pub.L. 76–19, 53 Stat. 561, enacted April 3, 1939, codified at 5 U.S.C. § 133, is an American Act of Congress which gave the President of the United States the authority to hire additional confidential staff and reorganize the executive branch (within certain limits) for two years subject to legislative veto. It was the first major, planned reorganization of the executive branch of the government of the United States since 1787. The Act led to Reorganization Plan No. 1, which created the Executive Office of the President.

As Governor of New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt had a reputation for reorganizing government in order to achieve efficiency. The Economy Act of 1933, enacted in Roosevelt's Hundred Days to combat the Great Depression, gave the president the authority to engage in limited reorganization of the executive branch in order to achieve economic recovery goals. But the president took no action during the two-year term of authority granted by the Act. By 1935, however, the keystone of the New Deal (the National Industrial Recovery Act) had been declared unconstitutional and Roosevelt's views on how to effect recovery had shifted away from economic intervention and toward social justice (a legislative program known as the "Second New Deal"). Many influential members of Congress, political scientists, and public administration experts had strongly criticized Roosevelt's preference for the proliferation of executive branch agencies, a strategy used by him to experiment with responses to the Great Depression, as inefficient.

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