The secret government program that moved cats indoors during the 1930s

When weird programs harm human flourishing

In 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration became so concerned with the proliferation of domestic cats that a new government agency was created to deal with the problem.

The concern of FDR’s economic advisors, essentially, was that as families were quite literally starving for every bit of food that they could get during the Great Depression, the domestic cat population was growing and competing for the limited supply of the sustenance humans were consuming.

An AI-created image of Depression era cats outside in a farm field

So FDR, by executive order, created the Office of Feline Population Mitigation (OFPM), which was charged with coming up with solutions.

The agency came up with three big ideas for cats which persist to this day:

• The agency came up with the idea of “cat clay,” which we now refer to as “cat litter,” intended to move cats indoors so they don’t breed so indiscriminately as they did while roaming out of doors.

• The agency orchestrated the development of the first commercial “cat food” so that there was less competition for human table scraps.

• Scientists were deployed to figure out how to make spaying and neutering as practical a practice for cats as it was for livestock in the early 20th century.

The problem with all three of these solutions is that they required households already strapped for cash to redirect money to the purchase of cat litter, cat food, and cat sterilization. The OFPM’s ingenious solution was to require that anyone participating in any government program of any kind to follow the agency’s suggestions to control the pet population. If a person wanted to take part in any of the New Deal’s subsidies or employment programs, one had to at least attest to the fact that they were compliant.

The program continued on for decades and only slipped into public awareness when the agency famously enlisted the help of gameshow host Bob Barker to encourage Americans at the end of the Price is Right to “help control the pet population by having your pet spayed or neutered.”

This ended the program, as the Reagan administration shut it down in 1988, but by then the agency had accomplished its goal of having cats live their lives indoors, eat specially-made cat food, and American owners generally spay or neuter their pet in the ordinary course of a cat’s veterinary care.

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I spent more than 30 years in and around government, and I’m often surprised to discover the existence of a government agency or program. In this instance, you have never heard of the OFPM because I made it up. There is no such agency, never was, and hopefully never will be. To my knowledge, anyway. But most people aren’t surprised anymore that their government does some thing that they had never heard of.

To the masses just learning about things like U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), it would be of little shock if there really were a program created to deal with domestic cat proliferation. Is that any weirder than a program to translate Sesame Street into Arabic?

But the cat program I invented was designed to teach a lesson about how the government’s meddling can result in shifts in animal behavior. The same can be said for government programs and their impact on human behavior, too.

Take for example, the very real and not at all made up Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs. As reported on National Public Radio on Thursday:

Unless you're a company that does work for the federal government, you've likely never heard of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs. Its primary role has been enforcing an executive order signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 at the height of the civil rights era. It required most federal contractors to take steps to ensure women and people of color have the same opportunities as others - that there aren't barriers to employment or to promotions.

NPR’s report goes on to lament that the Trump administration is taking steps to dismantle this office.

Jenny Yang oversaw this work at the Labor Department during the Biden administration. She notes federal contractors employ a whopping 20% of the U.S. workforce. So the old executive order has been a big deal. It's given rise to groups like Chicago Women in Trades whose mission is getting women in the door. For decades, they've trained women to become plumbers, electricians, pipe fitters, sheet metal workers. In recent years, the group has worked hard to meet what's expected to be a construction boom, with billions of new dollars approved for federal infrastructure projects.

In other words, since at least the 1960s, the federal government has quietly cajoled companies to hire and promote people based on race and sex. Such pressure using the force and power of government had results with women taking jobs that would otherwise had gone to men, as NPR reported, and I suspect this is true for black and Latino people, too. Supporters of the program, however, also acknowledged that the office’s work wasn’t always productive, with the agency’s involvement in the workplace more or less being reduced to “an emphasis on checking boxes.”

I have no particular feeling one way or another about whether a woman should be a plumber or electrician or pipefitter. I know some people do, arguing that the physical labor of certain jobs has fallen to women if for no other reason than to fill a quota, not because they’re physically suited to a job.

But isn’t it interesting that the government does have an interest? You might ask yourself why that is. It’s not because the government is benevolent and wants women to have access to good paying jobs. Or because women have special places to hide a pair of wire cutters.

In the middle half of the 20th century, government wanted women to take on new jobs so that they could be taxed on the income from it. The effort of pushing women into the workforce also had the advantage, to the government that is, in giving it direct control over raising American children. With both parents working, the job of child rearing was passed on to the government.

When a program is put in place to achieve an objective, the resulting economic actions aren’t organic. The use of coercion to achieve an outcome necessarily means that once the coercive action goes away, different choices tend to be made because the coerced action has no real staying power, which causes a certain amount of upheaval, which is being documented now with the Trump administration’s actions.

Programs such as these — and by extension any kind of diversity, equity, and inclusion program that undermines meritocracy — makes it appear that society is shifting in some tangible way when such shifts are illusionary. A workforce made up of women plumbers and electricians might be perfectly natural but when blue collar jobs for women are created into existence because a company fears the loss of a government contract, it puts society itself in the weird position of being built almost entirely on artificial constructs.

If women risk losing jobs because of the absence of a government program or agency, it means that government has had too much influence on how the country behaves. More disturbing is that the government was able to accomplish this rewiring of society with most people being completely oblivious to what was going on. A program and a government agency existed for decades, and news reports are just now having to explain their existence and the potential impacts on their disappearance. It is extraordinary.

Additional thoughts on this, including a personal experience of being denied employment for not being female enough, for subscribers below. And hey, I’ve even thrown in an old timey picture of me and some guy named Bill Clinton from my early journalism days: