Cite as: 513 U. S. 374 (1995)
Opinion of the Court
utilization of regular procedures of business management," it was fully acknowledged that they were a "device" of "government," and constituted "federal corporate agencies" apart from "regular government departments." Pritchett, 40 Am. Pol. Sci. Rev., at 495. The Reference Manual of Government Corporations, prepared in 1945 by the Comptroller General, contains as one of its Tables "Corporations arranged according to supervising or interested Government department or agency," see GAO Corporation Manual x-xi. This lists the 58 then-extant Government corporations under the various departments and agencies, from the Agriculture Department to the War Department, and then concludes the list with five "Independent corporations"—analogous, one supposes, to the "independent agencies" of the Executive Branch proper. The whole tenor of the Manual is that these corporations are part of the Government.
This Court has shared that view. For example, in Reconstruction Finance Corporation v. J. G. Menihan Corp., 312 U. S. 81 (1941), Chief Justice Hughes, writing for the Court, described the RFC, whose organic statute did not state it to be a Government instrumentality, as, nonetheless, "a corporate agency of the government," and said that "it acts as a governmental agency in performing its functions." Id., at 83. In Cherry Cotton Mills, Inc. v. United States, 327 U. S. 536 (1946), we had little difficulty finding that the RFC was "an agency selected by Government to accomplish purely governmental purposes," id., at 539, and was thus entitled to the benefit of a statute giving the Court of Claims jurisdiction over "counterclaims . . . on the part of the Government of the United States," 28 U. S. C. § 250(2) (1940 ed.). Likewise in Inland Waterways Corp. v. Young, 309 U. S. 517 (1940), we found that the Inland Waterways Corporation, which similarly was not specifically designated in its charter as an instrumentality of the United States, see Act of June 3, 1924, 43 Stat. 360, was an agency of the United States, so that its funds were "public moneys" for which national banks
395
Page: Index Previous 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007