From the heel-nippers at ThinkProgress.
This is a very important subject/project: a summary of what's known so far about the efforts of the GOP and Rove to politicize every agency in the government. The functional result is having regulatory agencies do favors for big individual and particularly corporate donors. The amounts of damage done, of course, is huge, but it did return huge "donations" to the GOP. Now, I don't suppose it would be easy to prove quid pro quo, but this amounts to massive violations of the Hatch Act.
In 2005...Mehlman explained to one agency: You work for the secretary, but you are George Bush people. And it’s very important becasue Washington becomes a town where it’s very easy for everyone to build their own little empires. If there’s one empire I want built, it’s the George Bush empire."
Summary:
Between 2001 and 2003, Mehlman and Rove Visited Nearly Every Agency. "Over the past two years, Mr. Rove or his top aide, Kenneth Mehlman — now manager of Mr. Bush’s re-election campaign — have visited nearly every agency to outline White House campaign priorities, review polling data and, on occasion, call attention to tight House, Senate and gubernatorial races that could be affected by regulatory action." [WSJ, 7/20/03]
example:
Rove Briefed Interior Department Officials On How to Secure Sen. Gordon Smith’s Election. In 2002, Republican leaders in Oregon "wanted to support their agricultural base by diverting water from the river basin to nearby farms, and Mr. Rove signaled that the administration did, too." Rove made a presentation to the Interior Department, complete with "poll results" and "critical constituencies." Rove "visited the 50 Interior managers attending a department retreat at a Fish and Wildlife Service conference center in Shepherdstown, W.Va. In a PowerPoint presentation Mr. Rove also uses when soliciting Republican donors, he brought up the Klamath (River irrigation) and made clear that the administration was siding with agricultural interests." [WSJ, 7/20/03]
More at the link.
The Act was sponsored by Senator Hatch following disclosures that WPA officials were in fact using their positions to win votes for the Democratic Party, just as many had alleged. Hatch, himself a Democrat, saw this as outright corruption which should not be tolerated under any circumstance by either political party, a feeling shared by most of his colleagues in the Senate.
ThinkProgress wants more examples; I think this is an important project; it goes to the heart of the "Bush Empire."