For at least 15 years, the State of California spends millions upon millions on programs like this to address prenatal care, AIDS, teen pregnancy, smoking cessation, eligibility for MediCal, getting your car's pollution controls checked, safe driving and so forth. I'm obviously not using my real name, but I can tell you I have worked on some of these programs and been part of the bidding process on others. A couple of agencies have made a bundle off these kinds of contracts -- Hill and Knowlton and Rogers and Associates are the firms that win more than their share, and they are legendary for cultivating the politicians and the bureaucrats in charge.

One interesting thing about these RFP packages. The success measurement is almost always part of the contract. A bidder comes in with a research firm attached as a subcontractor. The state, and the winning PR agency, have a mutual vested interest in the program appearing successful, so they keep control of how and when success will be measured. No independent surveys like the one you describe in your post.

(I just noticed how steeped I've become in their lingo. How their “success will be measured?” Don’t I really just mean, “what the results are?”)

You also might want to catch up your international readers on the case of Rob Reiner and his childcare commission. Years back, he and his Hollywood chums paid for a campaign that got the state to pass a tax on cigarettes to fund early childhood health programs. The take from that tax was given to a commission he controls to spend. Rogers and Associates, who helped him run the campaign to get the tax passed, then settled in as the agency running the commission’s PR and advertising campaign, which got a significant slice of the overall tax haul. Reiner decided the next dragon he should slay is “preschool for all.” So he ordered the commission to pay Rogers to publicize the need for “preschool for all,” that precise phrase, just as a Reiner-backed “preschool for all” electoral campaign was collecting signatures for a "preschool for all" initiative to appear on the March 2006 state ballot.

Eventually, even the Reiner-adoring media found this too much to bear, and exposed it, and Reiner resigned from the commission. (Search the Los Angeles Times or Bill Bradley's essential website "New West Notes" for the details.) The scandal fatally damaged his "preschool for all" campaign. In the meanwhile, however, Rogers has billed tens of millions in fees over the past decade on Reiner-related programs -- all paid for by taxes on smokers -- and I don't think anyone knows whether the health of toddlers has improved as a result even a whit.