Acronym Acrimony

The government has an aversion to spelling things out--not just in the sense of being transparent about operations, but typographically. The feds love their acronyms. They used to stick to whatever letters happened to go with the words, so we got things like the WPA and some slight confusion over whether DoE is the Department of Energy or the Department of Education (the latter is ED in official contexts). Sometimes the name of the program created some unintentional humor when it spelled out something that could be pronounced, like WAC or COD (Common Origination and Disbursement, an administrative feature of the federal student aid programs). I imagine this is why the Department of Homeland Security is not abbreviated with the lowercase o like many of the other cabinet-level departments--otherwise the DHS would be the DoHS, and Simpson jokes would abound.

We've been at this government thing for 216 years now, and all I can figure is the government is running out of permutations of the 26-letter alphabet in the 2-4 letter range, as there are only just under a half million of those and they would have had to hold it down to about 6 acronyms a day. The acronyms seem to be going longer now, so the acronym-makers have to make them pronounceable or the long string of letters starts to get unwieldy. I submit as evidence the non-government NCBTMB. Lately, though, the government seems to be going further and, rather than making pronounceable but nonsensical acronyms, they're making them standard English words. Sometimes long words. As much as I dislike the USA PATRIOT Act and the syntax that brought us that particular acronym, my hat is off to whoever came up with the phrase Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism. I'm pretty sure the legislators had some help coming up with that one.

This brings me to my point--you didn't think this was just a random rambling on government's propensity to abbreviate, did you? I am plotting out my next novel, to be drafted in March. L. Sprague de Camp's great advice in writing speculative fiction was to only change one major thing (makes it easier on the reader), so I am writing what I hope will become a series of novels that spring from making one basic change to society and following the logical consequences into the future. The change I am focusing on for this book, which was actually alluded to in the last one, is that the government eliminates unemployment and welfare programs and uses those funds to encourage job creation in the private sector by subsidizing part of a worker's salary in positions that the private sector creates, making it cheaper to create jobs. So my quandary is that I am trying to come up with a snappy government-type acronym for the program. So far, the best I can come up with is the National Employment Expansion Drive Jointly Operated to Benefit Society (NEED JOBS). I'm not particularly fond of that, even though it was three days' work coming up with it. Anyone have any thoughts on improving the acronym?