While they’ve grown up with a World Trade Organization, they have never known an Interstate Commerce Commission. (Class of 2017, #23)

This item is ridiculous as it supposed that the Interstate Commerce Commission was more than a peripheral blip on the radars of most average Janes and Joes before it was abolished in 1995. It’s remaining regulatory responsibilities were transferred to the Surface Transportation Board (STB) post 1995. How many students consider the STB to be an important cultural touchstone today? Likewise, would they have cared much about the ICC had they lived during the previous generation? The most important thing the ICC did culturally was abolish segregation on bus lines and in railroad dining cars, but that happened in the 1950s and early 1960s. Given that, conceivably the ICC could have been an item on the BML for the class of 1979 if the BML existed then, but even that is a stretch.

Should we expect an item on the 2018 list that mentions the shuttering of the Board of Tea Appeals in 1996? The BTA was a federal agency that adjudicated claims by tea importers who were denied the right to sell their products by a board of tea-tasters who made sure tea imported into the U.S. was of sufficient quality. That sounds more important than what the ICC was or wasn’t doing during the year they were born.

Crusty old professors are still mourning the closure of all the defunct New Deal agencies, so the reminder that the Bureau of Tea Appeals is gone may hit a raw nerve.