The key constraint to outlining the trade-offs of political interference in the bureaucracy to date has been a lack of adequate data. We rarely observe whether the bureaucracy delivers what was intended, in terms of the technical specifications of a project, but rather what they did deliver. This is a firstorder constraint on the empirical study of public sector productivity (Banerjee et al., 2007). A second binding constraint is that we almost never directly measure the personal interactions of politicians with bureaucrats (Iyer and Mani, 2012). More broadly, there is a limited empirical literature on bureaucrats, despite their importance as the main producers of public projects in many countries (Finan, Olken and Pande, 2017). To understand the delivery of public projects, it is important to understand the incentive environments in which bureaucrats operate: both the formal incentives in a bureaucrat’s contract, and the informal interactions she has with powerful actors such as politicians.

I make progress along both margins by collecting detailed data that follows the delivery of a representative set of public projects in the Federal Government of Nigeria, from their initiation in Congress, through the organizations that produce them, to independent evaluations of output. The data contain details of the politicians of Nigeria’s 5th National Assembly, surveys of a representative sample of bureaucrats at each of the organizations to which politicians delegate, and evaluations of how effectively each of 3,008 public projects - roughly 7 percent of the government’s budget - were delivered by these organizations in 2006 and 2007. Overall, it is a detailed profile of the key actors in the delivery of public projects and how they interact.

I assess the impact of a public project being in the constituency of a politician who is a member of the corresponding legislative sectoral committee monitoring that project. Membership of a sectoral committee (such as health or education) endows a politician with broad influencing powers over the bureaucracy within that particular sector. This allows me to assess the impact of committee membership on constituency projects in that sector relative to constituency projects for which the corresponding politician is not on the relevant sectoral committee. A politician has substantial power over the bureaucracy that implements projects in her constituency, but only for the sector in which she is a committee member.

The central identification challenge of the paper is that politicians may be made members of legislative committees for reasons that are correlated with the level and quality of project implementation in their constituency. For example, a powerful state may find it easier to both gain membership for their politicians on committees and complete public projects. To counter this concern, I argue that a substantial number of committee positions are reserved for individuals who are uniquely qualified in the relevant sector. These qualifications are based on choices the politicians made many years before their tenure as politicians. The identifying assumption is therefore that the determinants of the sector of profession of politicians are exogenous to the determinants of project implementation thirty years later by the federal government organizations they monitor apart from through their efforts on the committee. This approach is related to a congressional procedure studied by Aghion et al. (2005, 2009, 2010) and Cohen et al. (2011) which varies the extent of committee power that a politician has and builds on a recent literature that uses design features of government procedures to identify their impacts on internal processes (Bertrand et al, 2018; Thakur, 2018). The procedure allocates power to influence projects in a specific sector to a subset of politicians by making them members of congressional standing committees, but excludes others.

Using pre-existing qualifications as an instrument for committee membership, we find that projects in constituencies of politicians on the appropriate sectoral committee have an 18 percent higher level of project implementation than those without corresponding membership. The projects are 9 percentage points more likely to start, in the context of over a third of projects slated for implementation never being initiated. However, the projects are only slightly more likely to complete, and the corresponding 3