Читать книгу Saving Congress from Itself - James L Buckley - Страница 11
ОглавлениеTHE HISTORY AND NATURE OF GRANTS-IN-AID
I became aware of the imaginative scope of federal grants programs when, on my retirement, I moved to a small community in northwest Connecticut and subscribed to a daily paper published in a nearby city. I soon found it filled with reports of federal grants in support of an astonishing variety of civic purposes. To cite just a few, they included financing for an art center honoring Katharine Hepburn, the grant of $1.5 million of federal highway trust funds to restore a vandalized train station that had long since been converted to nontransportation uses, funds for the purchase of a farm’s development rights in order to preserve a town’s rural character, money for the beautification of roads leading into a small industrial town, payment of eighty percent of the cost of replacing a one-lane bridge connecting two small communities a dozen miles from my home, and a grant for widening of sidewalks bordering two streets leading to a local school.
That last is my favorite example of congressional imagination. Those sidewalks in Plymouth, Connecticut (population 12,000) were to be widened with the help of a $430,000 grant from the Federal Safe Routes to School Program whose stated purpose, quite literally, was to fight obesity by encouraging children to walk or bicycle to school. To that end, in 2005, Congress created the five-year program and financed it with $612 million of federal highway trust funds. If Plymouth parents had been offered that money to help battle their children’s obesity, it is anything but obvious that broadening sidewalks would have been their weapon of choice. But that is beside the point. Congress created the fund and no one turns down money from Washington, not even Connecticut taxpayers who send $1.45 to Washington for every dollar they get back in federal grants. They accept the money because they know that those recycled dollars will otherwise be spent widening sidewalks in another state.
Lest anyone conclude that these quixotic examples are peculiar to Connecticut, herewith are some others gleaned from Senator Tom Coburn’s 2013 “Wastebook,” in which he reported particularly egregious examples of government waste:
$50 million for a Maryland “transit center” that had quintupled in cost;
$65 million to enable New York and New Jersey to advertise that they are good places for business (never mind the truth-in-advertising concerns);
$195,000 for a substance-abuse program’s Hollywood party;
$3.9 million on an airport in St. Cloud, Minnesota, which has no daily commercial flights;
$1.25 million for the State of Florida to settle a lawsuit brought by one of its contractors;
$30 million for “coastal conservation” in Mississippi, part of which was spent on an art museum;
$800,000 for Las Vegas to award a prize to someone who had a good economic development idea;
$368,000 of “community development” money that went to a Montana electric golf cart maker; and
$532,000 to beautify one block on main street in Rossville, Kansas (pop. 1,150).
It is easy to poke fun at such federal expenditures because it is hard to think of purposes more quintessentially local in nature or further removed from the pressing concerns that ought to command Congress’s attention. The vast majority of federal grants, however, deal with needs that are generally accepted as important, such as the construction and maintenance of roads, assistance for the poor, and education. But others, such as the one that would widen sidewalks to fight juvenile obesity, illustrate Congress’s incurable temptation to propose a federal solution to any problem or need, however parochial.
That temptation is as old as the Republic. Thomas Jefferson, who vigorously opposed expansions of federal power proposed by Alexander Hamilton, nevertheless approved federal aid for the construction of what came to be known as the Cumberland Road. Its purpose was to serve newly settled areas beyond the Appalachians. James Monroe, however, later vetoed a bill for its preservation and repair based on his understanding that Congress’s spending authority was restricted “to purposes of common defense and of general, not local, national, not State, benefit” (message to Congress, May 4, 1822). While other early Congresses occasionally enacted legislation providing for the construction of roads and canals, until the outbreak of the Civil War, such proposals were routinely vetoed as unconstitutional.
The first grant-in-aid program of the modern kind was the Morrill Act of 1862. It authorized grants of federal lands to the states on the condition that they or the funds derived from their sale be used by the states for the establishment of agricultural colleges. President Buchanan vetoed an earlier version as unconstitutional, but the 1862 Act included a provision for military training in the colleges’ curricula that may have eased its acceptance as the Civil War was then in its second year.
Almost a century later, the federal government became involved in education in a significant way with the enactment of the National Defense Education Act of 1958. That was Washington’s response to the Soviet Union’s launching of Sputnik, the first satellite to achieve orbit, and the resulting fear that the United States was falling behind the Soviets in the field of science. Accordingly, because of what was viewed as a threat to national security, Congress authorized the distribution of grants to schools at all levels to accelerate our training of mathematicians and scientists. From that point on, the defense rationale was abandoned and Washington’s involvement in education grew at such a rate that twenty-one years later, in 1979, Congress found it necessary to create a Department of Education and a cabinet secretary to oversee it.
That same concern for national security launched the federal government’s wholesale involvement in the construction of highways. The need to facilitate the movement of troops and supplies in a national emergency was the justification given for President Dwight Eisenhower’s National Interstate and Defense Highway Act of 1956, which paid ninety percent of the cost of building a 41,000-mile interstate highway system. That ambitious project was financed by federal taxes on gasoline paid into the Highway Trust Fund. Because of its military rationale, this legislation clearly fell within the scope of the Constitution’s Defense Clause. Over the years, however, that fund has increasingly been used for a broad range of purely local uses, such as the replacement of a one-lane bridge linking two small Connecticut communities.
It was not until Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society that the creation of grants-in-aid programs became epidemic. In 1960, there were 132 of them; but by 1970, their number had quadrupled to 530. Over those ten years, transfers to the states rose from 7.6 percent of federal outlays to 12.3 percent (see Chris Edwards, Policy Analysis, no. 593). By then, the proliferation of federal urban grants led Peter Drucker to note, in his essay “The Sickness of Government,” that
during the past three decades, federal payments to the big cities have increased almost a hundred-fold for all kinds of programs, whereas results from this incredible dollar-flood are singularly unimpressive. What is impressive is the administrative incompetence. We now have ten times as many government agencies concerned with city problems as we had in 1939. We have increased by a factor of a thousand or so the number of reports and papers that have to be filled out before anything can be done in the city. Social workers in New York City spend some 70 or 80 per cent of their time filling out papers for Washington, for the state government in Albany, and for New York City. No more than 20 or 30 per cent of their time, that is, almost an hour and a half a day, is available for their clients, the poor. As James Reston reported in The New York Times (November 23, 1966), there were then 170 different federal aid programs on the books, financed by over 400 separate appropriations and administered by 21 federal departments and agencies aided by 150 Washington bureaus and over 400 regional offices. One Congressional session alone passed 20 health programs, 17 new educational programs, 15 new economic development programs, 12 new programs for the cities, 17 new resources development programs, and 4 new manpower training programs, each with its own administrative machinery.
But that was just the beginning. Congress had become so addicted to this form of federal largesse that by 2010 the number of grants programs available to states and/or localities exceeded 1,100 and, at a cost of $608.4 billion, they constituted 17 percent of the federal budget for that year, its third largest category of expenditures after entitlements and defense. They now provide states with about a quarter of their revenues. The adjacent table underscores the relentless increase in federal grants, which are projected to expand to $643.3 billion in 2014.
TRENDS IN FEDERAL GRANTS TO STATE AND LOCAL GOVERNMENTS
Distributions by function. Outlays in billions of dollars.
SOURCE: Budget of the U.S. Government, Fiscal Year 2015, Historical Tables.
NOTE: Rounded numbers not reflected in totals.
It is clear that over the past two generations we have experienced a radical change in how we govern ourselves.
ARGUMENTS IN SUPPORT OF FEDERAL GRANTS
There are essentially four arguments in favor of the federal grants programs. First, the federal government is better able to enlist the expertise required to craft the most effective approaches to the problems that the states share; second, it is in the best position to mobilize the money required to implement them; third, the states remain free to decline federal assistance and thus preserve their autonomy; and fourth, the grants provide a mechanism for the redistribution of money from wealthy states to the poorer ones, thus making it easier for the latter to maintain the educational and other standards to which all Americans are entitled. Each of those arguments has its limitations.
It is true that Washington is far better able than the states to call on the best academic and professional talent in designing programs. But that argument begs the question of whether any body of experts, however wise, will be able to come up with a single best approach to the provision of a social safety net or education or a host of other government services in a country as large and diverse as ours. Nor is it clear that the solutions academics produce on paper will work as expected when put into practice. The fact is that there is no evidence that federally mandated standards have ensured better results than those the states have fashioned on their own; and, as will be demonstrated in my discussion of costs, those standards can prove very expensive.
Take education as an example. As the quality of our public schools is of particular importance, it is worth noting that Washington’s first significant involvement in education began almost fifty years ago with the enactment of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Yet as Andrew Coulson has demonstrated in his exhaustive 2014 study, “State Education Trends,” during the succeeding decades there has been no improvement in the quality of education nationally “despite the near tripling of the inflation-adjusted cost of putting a child through the K-12 system.” In the one jurisdiction for which the federal government has constitutional responsibility, namely the District of Columbia, it has been abysmal. In recent years, the federal government has focused on raising standards though President George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” program and President Obama’s “Race to the Top” with, at best, mixed results to date. As I will demonstrate later, however, federal educational initiatives have placed extraordinary burdens on the states.
With respect to the second argument, it is also true that it is far easier for Washington to raise money, whether through taxes or borrowing. States are required to balance their books and their ability to borrow is restricted. Those restrictions impose a discipline on the states that is not to be found in Washington because the federal government has a virtually unlimited ability to borrow. Its debt, however, is rising at an alarming rate and, in time, that debt will have to be repaid. What must be stressed is that the money that flows into Washington comes either from taxes paid by residents of the states or from loans that will have to be repaid by their children or grandchildren. The ease with which Washington can borrow is not an advantage; it is a growing problem.
The third argument is true as far as it goes. States are indeed free to decline participation in federal grants programs. The reality is that in only the rarest cases are they able to resist the offer of money from the federal government. I recall the testimony of a southern governor who appeared as a witness at one of my Senate Public Works Committee hearings. He described the punishing political flak he had endured when he had the temerity to decline forty percent federal funding for an urgently needed state highway project. He had declined it because abiding by the federal rule book would have delayed the project’s completion by three years and required compliance with standards more appropriate for Alaska than his state. Adherence to the standards would have increased the project’s cost to such a degree that the governor was able to save money and a substantial amount of time by forgoing the federal grant. The irresistible political pressure produced by the offer of federal money was neatly captured in a March 3, 1971, Wall Street Journal editorial by Robert L. Bartley that discussed the “gold-plated octagon problem” lamented by officials in Washington. Their thesis was that if Congress were to enact a law offering to reimburse half the cost of erecting gold-plated octagons, every town in America would soon have one.
I acknowledge, however, that Obamacare’s attempt to achieve a major increase in Medicaid enrollment has met with unprecedented resistance despite its provision for one hundred percent federal financing during the program’s first three years. As of August 2014, twenty-one states have declined this offer because, over the years, federal prodding and inducements had already caused Medicaid to become the largest expense on state budgets. In recent years, there has been increasing question as to whether the accompanying federal rules permit the most effective ways of ensuring adequate health care for the poor. There is also concern that Obamacare’s raising of the eligibility level to 138 percent of the Federal poverty line, in combination with other welfare measures that are devoid of work requirements, will create disincentives to securing employment that could lead to permanent dependency. As a number of governors have pointed out, work requirements were the key to the 1998 welfare reform’s success in reducing welfare rolls and putting people back to work. In the view of those governors, the acceptance of even one hundred percent federal financing during the initial years would have locked their states into a set of federal eligibility standards and regulations that would cripple their ability to achieve necessary reforms. Those considerations explain this atypical refusal to take the federal bait.
With respect to the fourth defense of grants-in-aid, it is true that the programs effect a significant transfer of money from the have to the have-not states. In 2005, for example, Connecticut received 69 cents in grants for every dollar it sent to Washington. By contrast, New Mexico received $2.03. Thirty-two states are net beneficiaries of this redistribution and that, in turn, provides their representatives in Congress with a special incentive to support those programs. There are, of course, some strong arguments in favor of this redistribution: the have-not states may not be able to afford the quality of services, such as education, that the richer ones can provide. As I will explain later, however, if federal transfers from the haves to the have-nots are indeed justified, there is a more effective way of accomplishing that goal without saddling the recipients, rich and poor alike, with tangles of federal regulations.
