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Politicizing Agency Spending Authority: Lessons from a Bush-era Scandal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 November 2011

SANFORD C. GORDON
SANFORD C. GORDON*
Affiliation:
New York University
*
Sanford C. Gordon is Associate Professor, Wilf Family Department of Politics, New York University, 19 W. 4th Street, New York, NY 10012 (sanford.gordon@nyu.edu).
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Abstract

When can presidents direct bureaucrats to allocate government expenditures for electoral purposes? To address this question, I exploit a scandal concerning the General Services Administration (GSA), an agency that contracts with private vendors to provide supplies and real estate to other agencies. Shortly after Republican losses in 2006, a White House deputy gave a presentation to GSA political appointees identifying potentially vulnerable congressional districts. I find that vendors in prioritized Republican districts experienced unusually large new contract actions from the GSA's Public Buildings Service following the presentation relative to unmentioned districts, a discrepancy that disappeared once the Washington Post broke the story. Contracts supervised by the agency's Federal Acquisition Service, by contrast, were largely unresponsive to the briefing and media scrutiny. My findings suggest that the extent to which executives succeed in politicizing discretionary allocation decisions depends upon key features of the implementing agency's tasks and its informational environment.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 105 , Issue 4 , November 2011 , pp. 717 - 734
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2011

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