Government bureaucracy is something Americans have long loved to
hate. Yet despite this general antipathy, some federal agencies
have been wildly successful in cultivating the people's favor.
Take, for instance, the U.S. Forest Service and its still-popular
Smokey Bear campaign. The agency early on gained a foothold in the
public's esteem when President Theodore Roosevelt championed its
conservation policies and Forest Service press releases led to
favorable coverage and further goodwill.
Congress has rarely approved of such bureaucratic independence.
In "Congress vs. the Bureaucracy," political scientist Mordecai
Lee--who has served as a legislative assistant on Capitol Hill and
as a state senator--explores a century of congressional efforts to
prevent government agencies from gaining support for their
initiatives by communicating directly with the public.
Through detailed case studies, Lee shows how federal agencies
have used increasingly sophisticated publicity techniques to muster
support for their activities--while Congress has passed laws to
counter those PR efforts. The author first traces congressional
resistance to Roosevelt's campaigns to rally popular support for
the Panama Canal project, then discusses the Forest Service, the
War Department, the Census Bureau, and the Department of
Agriculture. Lee's analysis of more recent legislative bans on
agency publicity in the George W. Bush administration reveals that
political battles over PR persist to this day. Ultimately, despite
Congress's attempts to muzzle agency public relations, the
bureaucracy usually wins.
Opponents of agency PR have traditionally condemned it as
propaganda, a sign of a mushrooming, self-serving bureaucracy, and
a waste of taxpayer dollars. For government agencies, though,
communication with the public is crucial to implementing their
missions and surviving. In "Congress vs. the Bureaucracy," Lee
argues these conflicts are in fact healthy for America. They
reflect a struggle for autonomy that shows our government's system
of checks and balances to be alive and working well.
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