Frances Perkins had first suggested a federally financed public works program, and the idea received considerable support from Harold L. Ickes, James Farley, and Henry Wallace. After having scaled back the initial cost of the PWA, Franklin Delano Roosevelt agreed to include the PWA as part of his New Deal proposals in the "Hundred Days" of spring 1933.

Public Works Administration (PWA), in U.S. history, New Deal government agency (1933–39) designed to reduce unemployment and increase purchasing power through the construction of highways and public buildings. Authorized by the National Industrial Recovery Act (June 1933), the agency was set up by President Franklin D. Roosevelt under the administration of his secretary of the interior, Harold L. Ickes. During its existence, the PWA spent about $4 billion in the construction of more than 70 percent of the nations’ new educational buildings; 65 percent of its new courthouses, city halls, and sewage-disposal plants; 35 percent of its new public-health facilities; and 10 percent of all new roads, bridges, and subways. As the nation moved into a war economy, beginning in 1939, the PWA was gradually liquidated.

Introduction: Established on June 16, 1933 by Title II of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), the Public Works Administration (PWA) was an expansive, Great Depression-era Federal government spending program that aimed to create jobs while improving the nation’s infrastructure. The Public Works Administration (PWA) budgeted several billion dollars to be spent on the construction of public works as a means of providing employment, stabilizing purchasing power, improving public welfare, and contributing to a revival of American industry. More than any other New Deal program, the PWA epitomized the President’s notion of “priming the pump” to encourage economic growth. Between July 1933 and March 1939, the PWA funded the construction of more than 34,000 projects, including airports, electricity-generating dams, and aircraft carriers; and seventy percent of the new schools and one third of the hospitals built during that time. It also electrified the Pennsylvania Railroad between New York and Washington, D.C. PWA workers built the state capitol building in Oregon, the highway linking the Florida Keys to the mainland United States, the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, the Federal Trade Commission Building in Washington, D.C., the city hall in Kansas City, Outer Drive Bridge in Chicago, the Ellis Island Ferry Building, Washington National Airport and the Grand Coulee Dam in the state of Washington.