Federalism, Homeland Security and National. Homeland Security and National Preparedness. 43 Long established grants-in-aid programs have administrative.Today there are more than 1,1. The system is a complicated mess, and it is getting worse all the time. To ensure that people understood the limits on federal power, the nation’s founders added the Constitution’s Tenth Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” The Tenth Amendment embodies federalism, the idea that federal and state governments have separate areas of activity and that federal responsibilities were “few and defined,” as James Madison noted. Historically, federalism acted as a safeguard of American freedoms. President Ronald Reagan noted in a 1. Federalism is rooted in the knowledge that our political liberties are best assured by limiting the size and scope of the national government.”1. Unfortunately, policymakers and courts have mainly discarded federalism in recent decades. Congress has undertaken many activities that were traditionally reserved to the states and the private sector. Grants- in- aid are a key mechanism that the federal government has used to extend its power into state and local affairs. Grant programs are subsidies that come part and parcel with federal regulations designed to micromanage state and local activities. The federal government will spend $5. Social Security and national defense. Some of the major federal aid programs are in the areas of education, health care, housing, and transportation. There are few, if any, advantages of federalizing state and local activities through grant programs, but many disadvantages. The aid system encourages excessive spending and bureaucratic waste, creates a lack of political accountability, and stifles policy diversity and innovation in the states. With the ongoing flood of red ink in Washington, now would be a good time to begin cutting the vastly overgrown grants- in- aid system. In 1. 81. 7, for example, President James Madison vetoed a bill that would have provided federal aid to construct roads and canals. In 1. 83. 0, President Andrew Jackson vetoed a bill to provide aid for a road project in Kentucky arguing that it was of “purely local character” and that funding would be a “subversion of the federal system.”4. The resistance to federal funding of state activities started to weaken toward the end of the 1. The Morrill Act of 1. This was the first grant program with “strings attached.” It included detailed rules for recipients to follow and required them to submit regular reports to the federal government. Federal aid activity increased substantially in the early 2. When the income tax was introduced in 1. From the beginning, many aid programs required states to match federal funds on a dollar for dollar basis. Unfortunately, matching requirements have induced excessive state spending and continuous program expansion. Federal aid has also prompted the growth in state bureaucracies, partly because aid programs have often required that states set up new agencies to oversee spending in the prescribed activities. There was initial resistance to the expansion of federal aid, but it was politically difficult for states to opt- out of new aid programs. For example, a 1. Congress defined very broadly. Another example was 1. Why did grants-in-aid programs grow rapidly? What was the appeal to state officials? Define conditions of aid, mandates, and waivers. The aid was to pay for forest activities near navigable rivers, which thus could be said to be related to interstate commerce. The number of grants- in- aid programs rose from 1.
The largest expansion of federal granting during this period was the 1. However, it was during the 1. Under President Lyndon Johnson, aid programs were added for housing, urban renewal, education, health care, and many other activities. The number of aid programs quadrupled from 1. In the 1. 96. 0s, policymakers were optimistic that federal experts could solve local problems—such as urban decay—with aid programs. But the optimism began to diminish even by the early 1. President Richard Nixon argued that federal aid was a “terrible tangle” of overlap and inefficiency. In his 1. 97. 1 State of the Union address, he lambasted “the idea that a bureaucratic elite in Washington knows best what is best for people everywhere,” and said that he wanted to “reverse the flow of power and resources from the states and communities to Washington.”9 For his part, President Jimmy Carter proposed a “concentrated attack on red tape and confusion in the federal grant- in- aid system.”1. Unfortunately, Nixon and Carter made little progress on reforms. Ronald Reagan had more success at sorting out the “confused mess” of federal grants, as he called it. In a 1. 98. 1 budget law, dozens of grant programs were eliminated, and many others were consolidated into broader block grants. The number of grant programs fell during the early 1. Reagan’s “new federalism” attempted to re- sort federal and state activities so that each level of government would have responsibility for financing its own programs. But Reagan’s progress at trimming the federal aid empire was reversed after he left office, and there have been no major efforts to reform or cut the federal aid system since the mid- 1. The aid system’s many failings have become more acute as hundreds of more programs have been added in recent years. According to my analysis, the number of aid programs soared from 6. President Obama’s health care law of 2. Medicaid, which is the largest federal aid program. Federal aid spending is expected to be $5. Aid programs range from the giant $2. Medicaid to hundreds of more obscure programs, such as a $1. Nursing Workforce Diversity,” a $1. Boating Safety Financial Assistance,” and a $1. Healthy Marriages.” Federal aid can be distributed in the form of project grants or formula grants. Under project grants, federal agencies distribute funding to particular state and local agencies after a detailed review of specific proposals. Project grants can also be “earmarked” or directed to favored activities by members of Congress. Project grants generally require grantees to submit proposals, detailed work plans, regular reports, and other paperwork regarding their use of federal dollars. While most aid programs are project grants, most aid spending is on formula grants. That is because many of the largest aid programs, including Medicaid, are formula grants. Under formula grants, legislation spells out how much funding each state receives based on factors such as state income and population. The states are often required to match some portion of the federal government’s aid with their own funding. Aid programs can also be categorized as either categorical grants or block grants. The bulk of grants are categorical, which generally target a narrow range of eligible activities and include detailed regulations that states must follow. By contrast, block grants fund a broader range of activities and generally give states more flexibility on the activities funded. Budget experts have long proposed that the plethora of categorical grants be consolidated into fewer and simpler block grants. One factor is that members of Congress can better target their favored special interests using categorical grants. Categorical grants are also in sync with the fragmented committee structure in Congress. That is, each of the dozens of committees and subcommittees in Congress want their own realm of grant programs to preside over. If grants were consolidated, members would lose some of their power to direct and control federal hand- outs. One question that arises with regard to the federal aid system is how it redistributes resources between the 5. The system involves the raising of hundreds of billions of dollars a year in taxes from individuals and businesses across the nation, and then running the money through the Washington bureaucracy and dishing it back to government agencies in the states. There is no overall plan to the system; instead, it has grown in an ad hoc manner over many decades. The aid system is mainly financed by the general fund of the federal budget, of which the largest revenue source is the personal income tax. The income tax is highly graduated or “progressive.” As a result, states with large concentrations of higher- income residents pay a large bulk of the nation’s income taxes, and thus finance a large share of the grants- in- aid system. As an illustration, the top two states in terms of overall per- capita federal taxes—Connecticut and New Jersey—pay more than twice as much in per- capita taxes as the lowest two states, West Virginia and Mississippi. Looking at the spending side, aid received by the states varies widely. In 2. 01. 0, for example, average grants- in- aid spending was $2,1. The state receiving the highest per- capita amount was Alaska at $4,8. Florida at $1,4. 92. The reasons for these variations in aid spending are complex. Project grants are generally distributed on a discretionary basis. But most federal aid is distributed by formulas, which are based on such factors as state populations, income levels, and poverty levels. Medicaid funding, for example, is distributed based on each states’ average personal income compared to the U. S. Thus, poorer states generally receive a higher federal match, although there are many complexities to the Medicaid allocation system. With open- ended matching grants, the expansiveness of each state’s spending affects the amount of funding drawn from Washington. Medicaid, for example, allows states substantial flexibility in structuring benefits, and thus those states that have more generous benefits will gain more federal matching dollars. New York has an expansive benefit structure, and it receives 1. Medicaid dollars even though the state has just 6 percent of the U. S. Consider the Community Development Block Grant program, which funds local development projects. One item in the formula that distributes funding to the states is “housing built before 1. How did this obscure provision get into the CDBG formula?
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
December 2016
Categories |