Cite as: 513 U. S. 374 (1995)
Opinion of the Court
Export-Import Bank of Washington as "an agency of the United States of America"); Federal Crop Insurance Act, § 503, 52 Stat. 72, 7 U. S. C. § 1503 (creating Federal Crop Insurance Corporation as "an agency of and within the Department of Agriculture"), and until 1962 none said otherwise. As we have described above, moreover, those later statutes, relatively few in number, took that statement, perhaps too uncritically, from an earlier statute pertaining to a corporation (Comsat) that was genuinely private and not Government controlled.
That Government-created and -controlled corporations are (for many purposes at least) part of the Government itself has a strong basis, not merely in past practice and understanding, but in reason itself. It surely cannot be that government, state or federal, is able to evade the most solemn obligations imposed in the Constitution by simply resorting to the corporate form. On that thesis, Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U. S. 537 (1896), can be resurrected by the simple device of having the State of Louisiana operate segregated trains through a state-owned Amtrak. In Pennsylvania v. Board of Directors of City Trusts of Philadelphia, 353 U. S. 230 (1957) (per curiam), we held that Girard College, which had been built and maintained pursuant to a privately erected trust, was nevertheless a governmental actor for constitutional purposes because it was operated and controlled by a board of state appointees, which was itself a state agency. Id., at 231. Amtrak seems to us an a fortiori case.
Amtrak was created by a special statute, explicitly for the furtherance of federal governmental goals. As we have described, six of the corporation's eight externally named directors (the ninth is named by a majority of the board itself) are appointed directly by the President of the United States—four of them (including the Secretary of Transportation) with the advice and consent of the Senate. See §§ 543(a)(1)(A), (C)-(D). Although the statute restricts most of the President's choices to persons suggested by certain
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