One of the strategies that President Franklin Roosevelt tried to combat the trials of the Great Depression was establishing a number of job-creating agencies designed to bolster the nation's infrastructure. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) was one of these agencies, hiring the unemployed to build highways and set up public buildings. Rehabilitating rural areas, restoring forests and cleaning up dilapidated neighborhoods were also part of the agency. Students can research the WPA and other related agencies and develop an oral report summarizing these efforts and giving highlights; to support the speech, the students could develop a slide show with embedded audio and video clips as well as pictures showing the changes these agencies made.
There are many principles that the federal government has established as mandates to ensure state and local participation. The 55-mph speed limit, initiated in 1973 responded to the first major oil crisis. Prior to 1973, the right to set speed limits had been left to the states, so the federal government had to threaten to withhold federal highway funding to ensure state participation with this new speed limit. Students can research federal mandates and present a summary of news articles about one particular mandates, addressing editorials both for and against the mandate.
On August 2, 2011, the U.S. national debt stood at $14.564 trillion, according to U.S. Debt Clock. As a project, students can show their classes the sheer scale of what this amount of money looks like. Google Sketchup can be used to multiply currency, and the images can go into a PowerPoint slide show. If your classroom has a multimedia projector, putting the debt clock up during the oral presentation and comparing beginning and ending debt can effectively illustrate government expenditures.
At the time of publication, the United States ranked No. 36 in per-pupil spending in the world. In top-ranked Lithuania, by contrast, the government spends almost four times as much per student as in the United States. A project about this category could measure outcomes on standardized testing in math and science among different countries. A domestic project could compare per-pupil spending in different states in America, looking at student performance on state tests and national measures such as the ACT and SAT to analyze the effectiveness of that spending.