Monitoring the Block Grant Program for Community Development

Abstract

By and large, the social science community has not devoted much effort to implementation studies of major new federal programs. Longitudinal research on what happens to new laws once they are enacted requires not only a major investment of time, but, for a nation as large as the United States, a network of researchers equipped to tackle the multiple aspects of program impact. Once a new program is enacted, the tendency among social scientists has been to turn their attention to the next hot issue, rather than to conduct research on how well any given piece of policy fulfills its intended purposes. This article reports on the highlights of an ongoing monitoring study by the Brookings Institution of the new block grant program for community development (CDBG). The Housing and Community Development Act which established this program was enacted August 22, 1974, as Public Law 93 -3 83. The act authorized $8.4 billion to be distributed by the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the form of broad, flexible payments made by the federal government to qualifying local governments. The CDBG program took seven previ-