Since 2023 it has lead U.S. government activities related to safe Artificial Intelligence development and, from 1913 to 1939, it managed the National Aquarium.

The department is headed by the Secretary of Commerce, who is a member of the President's Cabinet and tenth in the United States presidential line of succession.

[1]The responsibilities of its major operating units include weather forecasting, climate monitoring, and fisheries management (NOAA); promoting U.S. exports and attracting foreign direct investment (International Trade Administration); producing the decennial census and other vital and economic statistics (Bureau of the Census); regulating the export of sensitive technologies (Bureau of Industry and Security); registering patents, trademarks, and copyrights (U.S. Patent and Trademark Office); managing and preserving the United States customary system of weights and measures (National Institute of Standards and Technology); maintaining the national interoperable broadband emergency network (FirstNet Authority); and coordinating economic recovery following a major disaster (Economic Development Administration).

[6] In 2020, the Department of Commerce suffered a data breach following a cyberattack likely conducted by a nation state adversary, possibly Russia.

Secretary of Commerce was considered a minor Cabinet post, with limited and vaguely defined responsibilities, but Hoover, emphasizing his identity as a businessman, accepted the position.

[12] His experience mobilizing the war-time economy convinced him that the federal government could promote efficiency by eliminating waste, increasing production, encouraging the adoption of data-based practices, investing in infrastructure, and conserving natural resources.

[13] Hoover sought to foster a balance among labor, capital, and the government, and for this he has been variously labeled a "corporatist" or an associationalist.

[12] In response to the Depression of 1920–21, he convinced Harding to assemble a presidential commission on unemployment, which encouraged local governments to engage in countercyclical infrastructure spending.

[15] When Hoover joined the department, almost no families had radios; when he became president in 1929, 10 million owned one, and most of the rest listened in a nearby home, store or restaurant.

[16][17][18] Hoover was also influential in the early development of air travel, and he sought to create a thriving private industry boosted by indirect government subsidies.

[21] With the goal of encouraging wise business investments, Hoover made the Commerce Department a clearinghouse of information.

He recruited numerous academics from various fields and tasked them with publishing reports on different aspects of the economy, including steel production and films.

From 1949 to 1994, the department worked with the 17-nation Coordinating Committee on Multilateral Export Controls, which restricted technological flows to the Soviet Union and other communist nations.

[29] On July 20, 2020, the commerce department announced adding eleven Chinese firms to an export blacklist for committing human rights abuse against Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang by conducting genetic analysis on them.

[35] On January 13, 2012, President Barack Obama announced his intentions to ask the United States Congress for the power to close the department and replace it with a new cabinet-level agency focused on trade and exports.

[37] Later that year, shortly before the 2012 presidential election, Obama invoked the idea of a "secretary of business" in reference to the plan.

Some Congress members expressed concern that the Office of the United States Trade Representative would lose focus if it were included in a larger bureaucracy, especially given its status as an "honest broker" between other agencies, which tend to advocate for specific points of view.

[36][40] The overall plan has also been criticized as an attempt to create an agency similar to Japan's powerful Ministry of International Trade and Industry, which was abolished in 2001 after some of its initiatives failed and it became seen as a hindrance to growth.

However, environmental groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council feared that the reorganization could distract the agency from its mission of protecting the nation's oceans and ecosystems.