RUTHFULLY YOURS

The federal government has spent more than $4 billion on public relations services since 2007, according to a watchdog group, with more than half of the money going to the world’s largest firms.

A review conducted by Open the Books found that there are now 3,092 public affairs professionals working in the government, an increase of 15 percent — or about 400 people — over the past seven years.

During that time, 139 federal agencies inked $2.02 billion in outside contracts with firms that perform public relations, polling, research and marketing consulting.
“We always applaud agencies who make information available,” Open the Books said in its report. “But … agencies are not charged with making that information interesting or newsworthy. Agencies certainly aren’t charged with using taxpayer funds to engage in thinly-veiled propaganda campaigns that are primarily designed to protect their budgets and hype outcomes.”

The $2 billion tally calculated by the watchdog group includes millions of dollars on international polling for the State Department and $57.7 million in marketing and advertising contracts from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to promote the National Flood Insurance Program.

Federal agencies spend billions on self-promotion By Kellan Howell

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/dec/7/federal-government-agencies-spend-billions-on-self/

The federal government for years has been using Americans’ tax dollars to pay for its own PR through carefully coordinated marketing campaigns, to the tune of billions of dollars.

Over the past seven years, federal agencies have spent more than $4.3 billion on self-promotion and marketing, according to government contract data compiled from USASpending.gov in an oversight report by spending watchdog OpentheBooks.com.
Federal agencies spent $2.35 billion in salary and bonus payments to federal employees with the job title of “public affairs officer” and more than $2 billion on outside contractors for additional public relations projects, according to the report.

In fact, the U.S. government employs so many public affairs officers that it ranks as the second-largest public relations firm in the world in terms of the number of employees.

Although it is certainly important and necessary for federal agencies to engage in public relations in order to make information available to taxpayers and to understand the markets they serve, the report highlights cases in which the government’s marketing budget appears to border on propaganda and pandering.

Law enforcement officials in San Bernardino and Los Angeles may have investigated Syed Farook one week before the shooting on the community development center on December 2, 2015, that left 14 dead and 17 injured, according to a review of police communications immediately following the attacks.

Federal and local authorities have insisted that neither of the attackers had aroused suspicion before the assault earlier this month and that both Syed Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, were unknown to law enforcement and US intelligence. But conversations between law enforcement officials in the hours after the shootings leave a different impression.

Farook is first identified by name at approximately 11:40am local time, just a half hour after the shooting began. The information came from a county worker, who noted that Farook had been acting nervous and left the holiday party twenty minutes before the shooting began.

In a subsequent exchange at approximately 12:08pm the dispatcher addresses an officer nicknamed “Trav” upon hearing “Syed Farook.” She says: “Reference that name, I believe one of the [garbled] was working that name up for something last week. I’ll have to check.”