About a month ago, the inspector general for the Department of Education wrapped up a probe of the agency’s proclivity for paying pundits to promote the president’s policies. The investigation’s final report said there was a systematic problem, but no laws were broken.
Federal investigators probing the Education Department’s public relations contracts have found a pattern of deals in which advocacy organizations received grants totaling nearly $4.7 million to promote Bush administration education priorities in newspaper columns and brochures, but didn’t disclose that they received taxpayer funds, as required by law.
The department’s inspector general says he detected no “covert propaganda,” but he told administration officials to consider asking for some of their money back.
The problem here had everything to do with how one defines “covert propaganda.” Inspector General John Higgins used an exceedingly narrow definition — so much so that his own report concluded that the administration contracted repeatedly with private media outlets to tout administration policy with a carefully-crafted political message without notifying the public that the government was paying for the message, but that this wasn’t covert enough to run afoul of the law.
The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office did its own review and came to the opposite conclusion.
The Bush administration engaged in “covert propaganda” in hiring conservative talk show host Armstrong Williams to promote a controversial education program, congressional investigators said Friday. […]
“We find that the department contracted for Armstrong Williams to comment regularly on the No Child Left Behind Act without assuring that the department’s role was disclosed to the targeted audiences,” a letter from the GAO to the Education Department says. “This violated the publicity-or-propaganda prohibition.”
As it turns out, however, taxpayers might get a refund. Given what’s happened, it seems like the least Armstrong Williams could do.