The Roosevelt Administration reacted by launching a rhetorical campaign against monopoly power, which was cast as the cause of the depression, and appointing Thurman Arnold in the anti-trust division of the U.S. Department of Justice to act, but Arnold was not effective.[clarification needed] In February 1938, Congress passed a new AAA bill, the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938, which authorized crop loans, crop insurance against natural disasters, and large subsidies to farmers who cut back production. On April 2, Roosevelt sent a new large-scale spending program to Congress, and received $3.75 billion which was split among Public Work Administration (PWA), Works Program Administration (WPA), and various relief agencies.[3] Other appropriations raised the total to $5 billion in the spring of 1938, after which the economy recovered.
Some economists believed that banking reforms already enacted were insufficient and that further reforms were warranted. Many suggestions put forward by Chicago economists in two 1933 memoranda that came to be known as the Chicago plan, were resurrected and recirculated in a 1939 draft proposal entitled A Program for Monetary Reform.