Changing Conceptions of Federalism

Abstract

The intense debate taking place in the 1980s about the role government should play in promoting the concerns not only the total scope of governmental activity but also the level of government in our federal system that should perform what functions. The New Federalism of the Reagan administration has represented a bold and controversial attempt reverse fifty years of American domestic policy by disassembling the constellation of grants local and state governments that the federal government was using help poor people and needy jurisdictions. Broadly speaking, the objectives of these federal grants were, first, provide the nonelderly poor a minimum level of income, food, housing, medical care, and job training; and, second, subsidize local and state governments for the delivery of certain services unrelated individual poverty, for the construction or rehabilitation of their physical infrastructures, and for incentives stimulate their economies. Federal financial aid programs cities and states are based primarily on Congress's so called spending power, which derives from Congress's constitutional authority to lay and collect taxes . . . pay the debts and provide for the and general welfare of the United States.' As Congress exercised it since adoption of the Constitution and as the Supreme Court eventually ruled in 1936,2 this clause permits the spending of federal monies not only in the substantive areas that Congress can regulate under its various enumerated powers but also for any purpose that comes within the meaning of the broad terms or common defense of the United States. Some limited and sporadic forms of federal assistance local and state governments date the early 1800s.3 But it was in 1933 during the depths of