The politicizing of federal workplaces for partisan gain is a crime, but don’t tell that to the Bush administration appointees busy on their rounds as in-house promoters of Republican candidates.

“Our hard work is noticed,” e-mailed a pleased official of the nation’s anti-drug abuse agency after helping the White House bolster vulnerable G.O.P. members of Congress with district visits and federal grants from anti-drug officials in the months before the 2006 elections. The e-mailer apologized that leaders from the supposedly politics-free agency were dispatched to “god awful places” on the taxpayers’ tab, but took comfort in the word that, yes, Karl Rove, President Bush’s political guru, was pleased with the agency’s campaign to help more than a dozen shaky candidates.

This latest episode of the administration’s treatment of incumbency as a 24/7 campaign machine is properly under investigation by Congress. The White House’s partisan paw print is already all over the firings of nine United States attorneys in an increasingly obvious political purge. And investigators have found that the Hatch Act law barring politicking on the job was violated by a G.O.P. loyalist who ran the General Services Administration, the government’s contract-rich, housekeeping monolith. “Help our candidates,” Lurita Doan, the G.S.A. administrator, was widely quoted, instructing underlings to sit through a PowerPoint lecture by Mr. Rove’s operatives. The brazen topic was the use of agency clout to undermine the top 20 “House targets” next year among incumbent Congressional Democrats.

Taxpayers must wonder what happened to the notion of governance. The White House nonchalantly insists both parties have laced the duties of federal office with partisanship. Up to a point, perhaps. But the increasingly relevant question as more abuses are disclosed is just how far the Bush administration has gone in mocking the legal distinction between running government and running for office.