How much influence do congressmen and bureaucrats have over each other's policy decisions? Douglas Arnold offers a partial answer in this book, which focuses on the efforts of congressmen to influence bureaucrats' decisions concerning the geographic allocation of federal expenditures.

Obviously congressmen benefit when bureaucrats allocate federal projects to their districts, and bureaucrats benefit when congressmen support their programs.  They can, in effect, trade with each other.  Arnold develops a theory to explain the circumstances under which they choose to trade, taking into account their different propensities to trade, variations in their resources, and differences among policies.  He then tests the theory against extensive evidence from agency files, analyzing over eight thousand bureaucratic decisions related especially to the selection of model cities, the acceptance of applications for water and sewer grants, the construction of new military installations, and the closing of existing military facilities.  The evidence supports both the theory as a whole and the notion that bureaucrats carefully tailor their allocational strategies to fit each program's situation in Congress.