The Bureau of Zombie Management, a department within the Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency (FVZA), is a government agency charged with managing zombie populations in parts of 16 states and 21 federally mandated "Urban Risk Zones."
Function
The main duties of the Bureau include tracking and monitoring zombie populations (usually with the aid of radio ear tags), destroying zombie packs that stray from federal parklands, maintaining wooden shacks in isolated rural areas for humans to flee to during zombie attacks, and operating zombie control centers in 36 major cities. Interested sportsmen may also apply for a zombie hunting permit by writing to the Bureau or applying online at www.bzm.gov. Note that zombie hunting is only allowed during the authorized zombie hunting season which varies from year to year but is generally in the fall. Contact your local zombie control center for more information.
The Bureau of Zombie Management also jointly funds, in partnership with the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Zombie Research, located in Des Moines, Iowa, which specializes in anti-zombie serums and has recently embarked on the exciting new Zombie Proteomics Project. The Institute is always looking for qualified zombologists to join its team in this cutting-edge research and encourages interested parties to apply on its website, at www.nizr.gov.
Current Initiatives
The Healthy Zombies Initiative: When Zombie populations grow too large, zombie packs sometimes turn on themselves, eating each other in conflagrations of zombie-on-zombie rage. In order to prevent these incidents, which could lead to dangerously low zombie levels, the Bureau has proposed a comprehensive program of systematic year-round zombie hunting to keep zombie populations at healthy levels. However, critics of the initiative claim that zombie populations are already at record lows in most areas, that further hunting is not needed, and that the initiative is simply a boondoggle for private zombie-hunting corporations that stand to make large profits from an increase in federally subsidized zombie hunting.
The Zombie Lease Program: The Federal Zombie Lease Program is a new initiative to allow licensed organizations to pay a nominal fee for the right to capture zombies on federal lands for private use. The Bureau argues that the initiative will help revive one of America's most cherished cultural assets - the low-budget zombie movie - which has been on the decline in recent years, by providing low-budget filmmakers with real zombies at affordable prices. Critics point out however, that the biggest customers have been Japanese filmmakers and Chinese factory owners, who have in some cases been able to acquire cheap zombie labor from a federal program subsidized by American taxpayers for less than a dollar a zombie.
History
Zombie control has a long history in the American federal government. President Andrew Jackson may have been the first to recognize the growing threat of zombies to the American public when he directed the Army to hire five full-time "Zombie Agents" to patrol the western territories in 1832. The second Cleveland Administration established a "Commission on Zombie Affairs" in 1895, but the commission was disbanded four years later under President McKinley as an unnecessary extravagance. The pro-business McKinley felt that the American public could be entrusted to control zombie populations themselves, and instead favored shotgun-proliferation legislation.
It was President Theodore Roosevelt who first understood the necessity to protect endangered zombie habitat after his tragic accidental shooting of a baby zombie while on a hunting trip in 1904. Roosevelt's efforts later led to the establishment of the first federal zombie preserve, of which there are now seven in four different states.
Zombie management funding was slashed dramatically under the administration of Herbert Hoover, leading to a rash of zombie infestations in the early 1930s. This inspired President Franklin Roosevelt to establish in 1934 the ZPA (Zombie Progress Administration), a federal program to provide zombie-hunting jobs to America's unemployed.
Zombie management was also neglected during World War II, when many of America's best zombie-hunters were drafted into the military and sent overseas, and America's vast shotgun and crowbar reserves were appropriated for the war effort. This led to the rise of "Rosie the Zombie-hunter", the catchall phrase for the heroic housewives who left their homes to become Zombie-hunters while the men were away.
But when the zombie-hunters returned home from the war, they needed their old jobs back, and some of America's best zombie-hunting women were ignominiously fired and had to return to their previous lives of household drudgery. Meanwhile, as part of the postwar reorganization of federal agencies, zombie management duties were folded into J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, in an effort to streamline the related processes of zombie-hunting and preventing communist infiltration.
The current Bureau of Zombie Management was formed as part of the Zombie Protection and Control Act, signed into law by Dwight Eisenhower on January 8, 1957. Finally, the Bureau was subsumed as a subsection of the newly created Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency as part of the Undead Management Reorganization Act of 1986.