Congressional Committees and Department Spending: The Political Influence on the Geography of Federal Expenditure in the United States

Abstract

The United States' Federal Government spends large sums of money annually on various departmental and agency programmes: the spatial pattern of this spending has a major impact on the country's geography of economic and social well-being. To understand that geography requires analysis of the political processes which determine the spatial pattern of Federal allocations. Correlation analyses reported here indicate the extent of the power of members of party groups in the various committees of Congress. ALTHOUGH there has recently been an upsurge of interest in political geography-in both its traditional content matter (Muir, 1975) and in the relatively novel area of political economy (Taylor, 1977)--little attention has been paid to the influence of political variables within other fields of geographical investigation. The main exception to this concerns the study of industrial location, for there is a long tradition of geographical interest, in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, in the effects of governments' regional policies on the pattern of economic activity (Keeble, 1976). But government involvement in the so-called mixed economies of countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States consists of expenditure on a much wider range of programmes than simply 'regional development'. Most of this expenditure has a spatial impact, in that it makes a contribution to economy and society in a particular place. Further, much of it is allocated as a consequence of spstial decisions; some money is allocated to particular programmes, some to particular programmes in particular places. To understand the geography of government spending, therefore, involves research into the political decisionmaking which underlies the spatial allocation procedure. The present paper presents one macro-analysis of such decision-making. A variety of approaches can be taken to this aspect of political geography. One could, for example, investigate a particular decision, such as where to locate a federal capital (Knight, 1977), or the activities of a government in a single constituent area of its territory (Weller, 1977). Such studies would allow in-depth analysis of how and why decisions are made. At the other extreme, the focus could be the total impact of all government programmes on its various constituent territories (as in King, 1973), providing tests of a theory of the outcomes of a particular decision-making process rather than a detailed understanding of one decision. This macro-approach, in line with the general trend in positivist human geography, is the one adopted here, with respect to spending by the United States Federal government.