George W. Bush's Federal Aid Legacy

Abstract

Most presidents since 1933 upon taking office have unveiled plans that subsequently defined or redefined the fiscal between the national government and state and local governments. The New Deal that was fashioned by FDR and the Democratic majority in Congress resulted in an explosion of new federal grant-in-aid programs, and by the end of the Great Depression, billions of dollars were being transferred from the national government to the states and their local governments on an annual basis. However, it must be understood that Franklin Roosevelt and his fellow Democrats in Congress probably did not intend to reshape intergovernmental fiscal relations as much as they sought to provide relief to the economic misery that enveloped the country during this period, and they concluded that the national government was the only government that was up to this Herculean challenge. Unlike Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower did come into office with a federalism vision and a determination to methodically sort out functional and fiscal responsibilities in our federal system. To assist in this endeavor, Eisenhower called for the establishment of the Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (better known as the Kestnbaum Commission) in 1953. Later, Eisenhower was able to capitalize on the visibility and political attention created by the Commission's report to persuade Congress to establish the former U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental as a means to direct concerted attention to interlevel relationships (Benton 2006). However, perhaps the greatest attention given to federalism issues, occurred during the Nixon and Reagan administrations. Upon assuming the presidency in 1969, Richard Nixon unveiled what he called his New Federalism, in which he promised to return responsibility for the implementation of many federally funded programs to the states and their local governments via a series of block grants with few strings attached, while also providing them with a new and almost unrestricted type of federal funding-revenue sharing. And, in spite of the fact that Democrats controlled Congress during Nixon's presidency, the Congress agreed with most of his proposals (Conlan 1988). Ronald Reagan, seeking ways to balance