The Hand That Doles The Pork Is The Hand That Rules The World
Posted on March 17, 2009 at 1:54 pmVandy prof Christian Grose’s research reveals that cabinet secretaries make a lot of decisions that affect which states get their bread buttered and which don’t:
While many people associate the word “pork” with lawmakers’ wasteful spending for pet projects, new Vanderbilt research demonstrates the importance of cabinet secretaries and their political ideology in the distribution of lucrative federal grants.
“Many voters assume that the president has extensive control over the decisions made by the people he appoints to cabinet posts,” said Christian Grose, assistant professor of political science at Vanderbilt University. “Executive agencies and the people who lead them have tremendous influence over which states receive billions of dollars from discretionary grants and contracts. The president himself has less influence over where money from federal agencies is spent, in part because he has bigger fish to fry.”
Grose and colleague Anthony Bertelli of the University of Georgia studied the allocation of contracts from the U.S. Departments of Labor and Defense from 1991 to 2002. They also examined the political leanings – conservative or liberal – of the heads of these departments throughout the same time period.
“What happens is Congress passes laws giving various agencies responsibility to allocate specific grants and projects,” Grose said. “Our research found that a more conservative cabinet secretary will choose to allocate more money to states represented by conservative senators and the opposite happens when a more liberal secretary takes office.”
