Department of Commerce, executive department of the United States government, initially established in 1903 as the Department of Commerce and Labor and reorganized as the Department of Commerce in 1913. The mission of the department is to promote domestic and foreign trade and to foster, serve, and promote the nation's economic development and technological advancement.

The Commerce Department performs a vast array of functions. It coordinates economic policies between the United States and foreign nations, negotiates international trade agreements, promotes increased U.S. participation in foreign markets, and provides the American business community with information on foreign markets. It also offers loans and technical assistance to minority-owned businesses in the United States; promotes development in economically depressed areas of the nation; subsidizes the U.S. merchant marine; explores the oceans and atmosphere; compiles weather reports; gathers and publishes statistical data, including the national census; and issues patents.

Major divisions of the department include the International Trade Administration, the Economic Development Administration, and the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The department also operates the Bureau of the Census, the Patent and Trademark Office, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (formerly the National Bureau of Standards), the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Minority Business Development Agency, and the Bureau of Export Administration.

Within the executive branch of government, the Commerce Department has often played only a minor role in the formulation and execution of public policy. Especially during the decades of the Cold War, following the end of World War II in 1945, Commerce Department efforts to promote business development and the growth of exports received far less attention from both presidents and the public than issues of diplomacy and national defense addressed by the Department of State and the Department of Defense. In this period, the most prominent commerce secretary was Malcolm Baldrige, who ran the department under President Ronald Reagan from 1981 to 1987. Baldrige exercised aggressive leadership through his advocacy of international free trade.

With the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, policymakers began to think about national security in terms of economic strength, providing an opportunity for the Commerce Department to define a broader role for itself. During the presidential administration of Bill Clinton, Commerce Secretary Ron Brown aggressively promoted U.S. business interests abroad, creating a new diplomatic role for the department. Brown believed that, in the long run, creating commercial relations with other nations would offer the United States the best opportunity to influence policies of these nations. His willingness to overlook political and military repression in nations such as China and India raised questions about the tradeoffs between human rights and commercial activity. During his tenure, Brown also fended off attempts by Republican Party members of Congress to eliminate the Commerce Department and transfer its operations to other agencies and departments of the federal government. In April 1996 Brown died in a plane crash while on a trade mission to Bosnia and Croatia. President Clinton appointed U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor as Commerce Secretary in April 1996.