Contracts, Agency Vulnerability, and the Allocation of Federal Funds

Legislators have the potential for credit claiming from agency spending in a congressional district only when the awarded contracts or grants are sufficiently large to be noticed or appreciated. Therefore, unlike previous research on distributive politics, we examine the allocation of contracts considering the size of the contracts, not just the overall spending or the numbers of contracts per congressional district. We use a difference-in-difference analysis to evaluate how agencies altered their allocations of contracts in response to the 2006 congressional elections, in which partisan control of the Congress changed to the Democrats. We find that federal agencies responded to the election by allocating larger contracts to Democratic districts. In addition, we find that agencies whose programs received lower scores on the Bush administration's Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) allocated larger contracts to Democratic than Republican districts than did agencies whose programs received higher PART ratings.