This is a draft Reorganization Plan from the Truman Administration creating a Federal Transportation Agency to include all functions currently exercised by the Public Roads Administration, the Coast Guard, the Civil Aeronautics Administration, the Civil Aeronautics Board, the U.S. Maritime Commission, and the Weather Bureau. The draft reorganization plan is dated May 8, 1946 and was never made public or submitted to Congress. (We found it in the Eisenhower Library, devoid of context, stapled to a 1956 memo from President Eisenhower’s brother Milton asking that the President’s Advisory Committee on Government Organization, of which Milton Eisenhower was a member, study “the general question of developing a Department of Transportation.”)

Truman transmitted three other reorganization plans to Congress on May 16, 1946 (one, two, three) but not this one.

The draft plan creates a new “Agency” – not a Cabinet-level “Department” – because Truman was operating under the powers given him by the Reorganization Act of 1945, which prohibited the creation of new Cabinet Departments or new Secretaries.