Using Federal Outlays Data to Measure Program Equity: Opportunities and Limitations

Abstract

Since the late 1960s, annual reports on federal spending in small areas have been available. This effort was initiated in the Community Services Administration (CSA) (formerly the Office of Economic Opportunity) in 1966 to monitor poverty program funds and was soon expanded to include most federal activities. Currently, the CSA has working annual files and published volumes for fiscal years 1968 through 1976. Published reports known as the Federal Outlays series are issued separately for each state and list the amounts of individual program funds spent by federal agencies in each county and in each city with a population of 25,000 or more. In total, over 1,300 program entries are reported for each county unit in the United States. The Federal Outlays is the only comprehensive series of county-level data on the federal government's spending. Earlier editions of the reports suffer from serious problems of completeness, accuracy, program identification, and definition, many of which have been resolved in recent issues. Beginning with the 1975 issue, program identification was greatly improved by labeling programs with the program numbers given in the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (U.S. Office of Management and Budget). This matching provides the user of the Outlays files easy access to the program descriptions in the Catalog. The purpose of this paper is two-fold: to provide illustrations of how the Federal Outlays data series can be used to address equity issues at the substate level and to give a brief overview of the current limitations of this data series. In exploring equity issues, the Outlays data are used in conjunction with data from the census of population, census of governments, Internal Revenue Service, and selected state departments of taxation. The equity analysis uses data from 1972, the latest year for which comparable data from all sources were available. The simple equity analyses that follow are illustrations of possible uses of the Outlays files and are not meant to provide firm answers to equity issues in federal spending.