10 Projects Funded by the U.S. Government

The United States government has funded countless projects over the course of its history, and they’ve had a wide range of purposes and effects, from creating jobs to building up infrastructure to preserving culture. Here are 10 projects that U.S. government funding helped bring to life—some more high profile than others.

1. The Flu Vaccine
2. The U.S. Highway System
3. LaGuardia Airport
4. The American Guide Series
5. “Roll On, Columbia” by Woody Guthrie (and 25 Other Woody Guthrie Songs)
6. Radar to Predict Weather
7. The Internet
8. Closed Captioning
9. The Human Genome Project
10. The Grateful Dead Digital Archive

The Flu Vaccine

The entire process that led to a flu vaccine wasn’t done exclusively in the United States. For instance, it was British researchers who isolated and identified the influenza virus. However, the first inactivated flu vaccine was born on the University of Michigan campus in a project financially supported by the U.S. Army. In 1941, the Army created the Commission on Influenza and put Tommy Francis at the helm. Francis was working in the University of Michigan’s brand-new Department of Epidemiology. In addition to advising on how to keep Army camps safe and healthy, they wanted him to develop a vaccine for influenza—the 1918–19 pandemic was not yet a distant memory, and they were concerned about a recurrence of that virus in particular.

Francis brought former colleague Jonas Salk on board the project, offering him a $2100 grant and a draft deferment. Francis, Salk, and their team used the embryonic fluid in chicken eggs to cultivate and test the influenza virus—and in less than a year, they had a vaccine ready for testing. The vaccine was first tested on psychiatric patients (informed consent did not yet exist for medical trials), which showed that it was effective, and by the fall of 1945, every member of the U.S. Army had been inoculated. Now, hundreds of millions get the flu vaccine each year, and according to the CDC, the vaccine prevented an estimated 7000 influenza-associated deaths in the 2019–2020 flu season. 

The U.S. Highway System

Road trippers today tend to take the more than 46,000-mile interstate system that crisscrosses the United States for granted—but building it was no easy task.

Officials started taking the idea of a federal highway system seriously after World War I. In the summer of 1919, 81 Army vehicles traveled from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco to test how an entire army might complete that trip. They made it but suffered through plenty of rough conditions, deficient bridges, and accidents along the way. Through the 1920s and ’40s, some attempts were made at jumpstarting federal highway systems, but there wasn’t sufficient federal funding to build anything significant.

In 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower became president, and he was committed to making a federal road system happen. He had firsthand knowledge of the need because he was one of those men traveling in the 1919 Army convoy. In 1956, Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act, the most effective attempt at highway legislation to that point. It created a 41,000-mile highway network and, most importantly, earmarked $26 billion to pay for it. The federal government was responsible for 90 percent of the cost, which it got from increasing the gasoline tax from 2 cents per gallon to 3 cents. The interstate took longer to build than anticipated (the last stretch of road opened in 1992), and in all, construction cost $129 billion. 

LaGuardia Airport

Without President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his Works Progress Administration, we wouldn’t have those decades of jokes about the condition of LaGuardia Airport. Under the New Deal, Roosevelt created the WPA in 1935 to address unemployment during the Great Depression. People were given work throughout the country to stimulate the economy. Much of this work was building or improving infrastructure, including 39,370 schools, 2550 hospitals, 1074 libraries, 12,800 playgrounds, 639,000 miles of roads, and much more. The largest single WPA project was the $40 million construction of LaGuardia Airport in Queens, New York, one of 800 airports the Works Progress Administration helped create. WPA art projects were also included in the build, like James Brooks’s mural Flight, which shows the history of aviation and was restored in 1980.

The airport opened in October 1939 with hundreds of thousands in attendance [PDF]. At the time, it was dedicated as New York Municipal Airport—but there was already a growing outcry to name it after then-mayor of New York Fiorello La Guardia, who gave an address at the opening. While he spoke, three airplanes wrote “Name It La Guardia” in the sky above, which he pretended not to notice. It was officially renamed LaGuardia Airport in 1953. LaGuardia recently underwent an $8 billion renovation that gave it a significant reputation boost; 33.5 million passengers traveled through the airport in 2024. 

The American Guide Series

The WPA also created jobs for out-of-work artists in a variety of media, from painting to theater to photography to writing. At its peak, the WPA’s Federal Writers’ Project employed 6000 writers. Its first planned endeavor was producing an “American Guide”: a five-volume series that would describe life throughout the country. But once the writers started working—most on guides they had local knowledge of—it was clear the project needed to be expanded. Eventually, the series had a guide for every state (at the time), plus guides for territories as well as individual cities, towns, and even highways.

There was a standard format for each guide, starting with essays on local culture and then progressing into specific locations and their attractions. There were suggested tours as well as photographs and drawings throughout. But because they were collaborative efforts between many writers who were chasing stories they found interesting, the guides took detours and covered a vast array of topics. In any given guide, you might find information about local folklore, music, education, industry, sports, and Native American tribes. California’s guide had an essay on “The Movies.” Illinois had one about Abraham Lincoln. They were just as extensive as they sound—the original guide to Washington, D.C. was over 1100 pages long and weighed 4 pounds.

The guides were published between 1936 and 1946. The exact number of them is unknown, but there may have been thousands. As the American Guide Project took off, the Federal Writers’ Project widened its scope and embraced further pursuits, including the well-known Slave Narratives in which 2300 formerly enslaved people shared their stories with WPA writers. 

“Roll On, Columbia” by Woody Guthrie (and 25 Other Woody Guthrie Songs)

During the era that federally-funded writers were scouring the country for local stories, Woody Guthrie was taking a paid gig with the Bonneville Power Administration, a government agency in the Pacific Northwest responsible for distributing electricity that came from the Bonneville and Grand Coulee dams on the Columbia River. One of the BPA’s priorities was getting the public on board with the idea of hydroelectricity. They produced a film called Hydro on the topic and were preparing to make a second film in 1941. The BPA’s public information officer, Stephen B. Kahn, wanted to hire a folk singer to work on the movie for a year to help make it more appealing to the masses. A colleague connected him with Woody Gutherie.

The pair initially met in Los Angeles, and in May of that year, Guthrie traveled to Portland, Oregon, to play some songs for Kahn. Kahn hired Guthrie with one catch: it would be a month-long job, not the originally promised year. (A gig of that length would have required agency approval; Kahn had also gotten spooked by Gutherie’s reputation for being politically outspoken and didn’t want any controversy encroaching on his project). Within that month, Guthrie wrote a total of 26 songs, including “Roll On, Columbia,” which has since been named the official folk song of the state of Washington; “Jackhammer Blues,” “The Grand Coulee Dam,” “Pastures of Plenty,” and “Hard Travelin’,” among others. In all, Guthrie earned $266.66, which Kahn called one of the best bargains in U.S. government history.

Radar to Predict Weather

During World War II, militaries used radar, or radio detection and ranging, to find aircraft in the skies above. But people using radar eventually realized that it picked up on precipitation, too, a phenomenon that was observed and tested all over the world. In 1946, the United States Weather Bureau, now known as the National Weather Service, was able to join this weather prediction research when it received 25 extra aircraft radars from the Navy. The bureau modified these radars and quickly put them to use, installing one at Washington National Airport and one at a Weather Bureau office in Wichita, Kansas, in Tornado Alley. Just a couple of years later, reports from the Wichita radar were used to direct a pilot out of severe weather and into an area where a plane could land safely.

In 1964, the U.S. Weather Bureau opened its National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma, and began experimenting with Doppler radar to develop the NEXRAD (Next-Generation Radar) system the United States uses to predict weather to this day.

The Internet

The internet is so ubiquitous now that it’s difficult to conceive of a time when even having a network of connected computers was novel. Like the flu vaccine, this technological development was being worked on simultaneously all over the world, including in England and France. The effort was led by the research arm of the U.S.’s Department of Defense, known as the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA (now DARPA.) By the mid-1970s, they had created a computer network called ARPANET, which connected 60 mainframes located around the country at universities, defense contractors, and government agencies.

To make this system useful for the military, though, it needed to be mobile: Soldiers in the field worldwide had to be able to access it. So ARPA started developing something known as “internetworking”—creating a wireless network that could send data, and connecting that network to ARPANET. Researchers Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf are credited for making the common language and protocol required to enable these connections. In the summer of 1976, they connected two networks. By November the following year, they had added a third, and the rest was history. Estimates say the U.S. government spent around $160 million in subsidies to create the internet, but the price tag may be up to 10 times that amount. 

Closed Captioning

In the early days of television, signals were primarily transmitted via radio waves—the same technology broadcast TV still uses today. But this system didn’t provide an obvious way to provide closed captioning to make the medium accessible to those who were deaf or hard of hearing. The National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST) began developing the functionality in 1970. Engineers Dicky Davis, James Jesperson, and George Kamas created a system called “TVTime,” which hid time codes in part of the television signal. With this technology, NBS collaborated with ABC-TV to caption an episode of The Mod Squad in 1971, and continued to fine tune it with the Public Broadcasting System. In 1972, Boston public television station WGBH founded the Caption Center and started airing captioned broadcasts of The French Chef with Julia Child. It took a few more years to develop captions that viewers could toggle on or off. In 1980, closed-captioned programs played on ABC, NBC, and PBS. That year, NIST, ABC, and PBS won an Emmy Award for the feat of engineering that was TVTime. 

The Human Genome Project

In 1990, the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health launched the Human Genome Project, an effort to map the entire DNA sequence of the human genome’s 3 billion letters. At the time, this was mostly uncharted territory; the hope was that mapping the human genome would uncover more about diseases and how to treat them. American geneticist Francis Collins led the project, but it was an international effort of scientists from all over the world.

Though it was originally scheduled for 15 years, the HGP wrapped early in 2003 with a sequence that made up over 90 percent of the human genome, which was as much as they could do with the technology of the time. The genome was created out of blood donations from multiple individuals. The project cost an estimated $3 billion, though some of that funding came from international sources. The cost was high, but so was the impact: The Human Genome Project pushed forward the world of genetic research. It’s now possible to sequence a genome in just five hours, and the process costs under $1000. We now know that some gene variants can help predict the odds a person will develop a genetic disease or have a particular trait.

The Grateful Dead Digital Archive

In 2009, UC Santa Cruz announced that it had received a $615,175 grant to digitize its Grateful Dead Archive, which the band had donated to the university’s library the previous year. (Why Santa Cruz? Around 2007, the Grateful Dead was preparing to close their headquarters, which included a 2000-square-foot warehouse of band history. At the time, one of the board members of their charitable foundation happened to work at UCSC’s Division of Social Sciences, so he helped facilitate the connection. Ultimately, the school beat out UC Berkeley in their bid for the archive thanks to a promise that there would always be a Grateful Dead exhibit in their university library.)

The archive contains artifacts dating back to 1965, like posters, business records, letters, and images taken by legendary rock photographers, among other things. The grant to digitize came from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which distributes grants to fund a wide variety of cultural and educational institutions, including museums, libraries, zoos, historic sites, and more. The Grateful Dead Archive now has over 45,000 digitized items accessible to scholars, teachers, students, and fans.

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