The autonomy and limits of U.S. bureaucratic agencies are subjects of great and growing attention in contemporary political science. In Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy (2001), Daniel Carpenter argued that late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century federal bureaucrats achieved independence from their congressional masters by establishing agency reputations and cultivating coalitions of constituents. A primary means of this reputation building was public advertising. A burgeoning newspaper industry, rapidly expanding postal service, and advancements in printing allowed entrepreneurial bureaucrats to appeal directly to citizens for support over the heads of their putative congressional overseers. Those overseers were not blind, however. In Congress vs. the Bureaucracy, Mordecai Lee shows that throughout the twentieth century, many members of Congress were alarmed at the scope and scale of federal agencies' public relations activities, recognizing them as the de facto lobbying campaigns that they were. He documents congressional attempts to curb bureaucratic autonomy by controlling federal agencies' public communications, and then evaluates the effects of these efforts on agencies' public relations activities.

The book offers a series of case studies that are organized into 11 chapters that span the twentieth century, from defunding the Panama Canal Commission's press agent in 1905 to regulating video press releases by the Department of Health and Human Services in 2005. Some chapters focus on a single agency or congressional session, while others span several decades and bureaus. In each chapter, Lee recounts an agency's public communications program, a formal congressional effort to control that program, and the effect (or lack of effect) of congressional actions on agency public relations activity.

A useful example is Chapter 2's treatment of the United States Forest Service (USFS), its legendary founding chief Gifford Pinchot, and his relationship with Congress. Winning public support for the USFS was a key to his pursuit of autonomy, and he was an early master of agency publicity. Pinchot pioneered the use of public relations mechanisms that are now commonplace: customized speeches for the White House, mass mailings of agency-produced pamphlets, made-for-media events, prepackaged news articles, and press releases. Frustrated USFS opponents in Congress attacked the agency's public relations program, which they recognized as one of the pillars of the agency's autonomy. In speeches and newspapers, Pinchot's congressional enemies denounced USFS publicity as self-aggrandizing propaganda. In 1908, Congressman Franklin Mondell (R-WY) introduced legislation that would ban the USFS from writing articles that placed “an exaggerated value on its work” and from “encouraging people … to impugn the motives or criticize Members of Congress and Senators … who do not agree with some of the policies and some of the acts of the Bureau” (p. 57). Pinchot's congressional allies pointed out that disseminating information about USFS programs was an important part of the agency's mission. In the end, legislation banning USFS-authored articles and press releases passed overwhelmingly, but the USFS's congressional supporters ensured that the language of the final legislation was so vague that Pinchot could continue his publicity activities unabated. So long as the USFS was not producing propaganda but, rather, disseminating “information of value to the public” (p. 61), it remained compliant with the law. Congress had exercised its authority to curtail agency publicity, but its effort packed no real punch.

A familiar pattern emerges from Lee's studies of more than a dozen congressional attempts to limit agency publicity: 1) An agency engages in public relations activities; 2) members of Congress who are hostile to an agency decry its publicity efforts as propaganda and propose limits to agency public relations; 3) the agency's congressional allies argue that dissemination of information to the public is a legitimate activity, carving out an exception for such dissemination; 4) legislation limiting agency propaganda passes easily and with fanfare; 5) legitimate publicity (information dissemination) and illegitimate publicity (propaganda) prove impossible to distinguish from each other in practice; and so, 6) the agency's public relations activities continue more or less as before, often with some changes to formal job and program titles that skirt congressional restrictions. Lee concludes that congressional efforts to muzzle agencies are ultimately “Sisyphean” (p. 224). Although the details of the cases vary in important ways, Congress vs. the Bureaucracy tells essentially the same tale of the Congress–agency relationship in nearly every one. The chapters are like verses of a song that each lead to the same hook and chorus, and the reader is left humming the tune.

Lee describes his approach as “descriptive historical theory” (p. 229); it is decidedly more descriptive and historical than theoretical. The book is at its best when the actions of specific people in specific times on specific issues are recounted in detail. The heavily footnoted, painstakingly constructed case studies offer the reader a sense of the back-and-forth play of congressional politics that can disappear from more abstract treatments of the topic.

As a theoretical work the book is less satisfying. The case studies accomplish the author's narrowly defined goals: to describe congressional attempts to muzzle agency public relations and to assess their effectiveness. However, the questions most likely to engage political scientists are left aside or receive only passing attention. Why does Congress try to muzzle some agencies and not others? Why do some members of Congress take up this issue when others do not? Why do congressional attempts to control agency publicity fail so consistently? Rich narratives answer these questions in each particular case, but Lee advances no general causal argument. Greater engagement with the literature on legislative behavior and the policy process could have provided useful frameworks in which to explain the phenomena that he chronicles.

Part of the difficulty lies in Lee's tendency to ascribe motives and actions to Congress as a monolithic whole. For example, he declares that “Congress has tried to assert its statutory and financial powers to threaten bureaucratic autonomy by limiting agency public relations, [and] the bureaucracy has almost always succeeded in negating Congress's will” (p. 4). This unitary actor assumption is odd, since the book is packed with examples of diversity in preferences and attitudes among congressmen. In nearly every case, some members of Congress seek to constrain agency publicity while others attempt to bolster their favored agencies' autonomy. Congressional failures to constrain bureaucratic public relations may be due to the inherent difficulty of distinguishing propaganda from information dissemination, but it might also be a consequence of effective counteraction by agencies' congressional allies. If enough members of Congress support an agency's activities, legislation to muzzle agency publicity may be intentionally weak. Railing against bureaucratic propaganda gives members of Congress easy opportunities for position taking, a chance to attack opposition-party presidents, and a platform for the ambitious politician to raise his/her profile on the national stage—none of which requires real constraints on bureaus. In other words, it is possible that congressional efforts to muzzle agency public relations are not really about bureaucratic autonomy at all, but rather are consequences of legislators' pursuit of policy and reelection.

Congress vs. the Bureaucracy advances our understanding of the Congress–bureaucracy relationship by documenting congressional responses to publicity campaigns by autonomy-forging bureaucrats. Students of bureaucratic politics will find in its pages detailed illustrations of agency publicity as lobbying mechanism, the limited capacity of Congress to resist agency publicity, and perhaps the empirical building blocks of a broader theory of the three-way relationship among Congress, the bureaucracy, and the citizens served by both institutions.