Federal Money Research Articles

Identity Politics within Kentucky’s Civil Service and the Growth of the Bureaucratic State

AbstractFor five decades now the various levels of government in the United States, through the use of affirmative action and diversity policies, have sought a more racially and gender-wise equitable society with respect to equal employment opportunity. Governments established hiring goals for women and racial minorities. Goals became quotas as state and local governments (and private employers) that were dependent on federal money made certain that goals produced desired results by preferring people based on their race or gender. This article is a case study of how the Commonwealth’s welfare cabinet over two decades ago used long-standing civil service regulations and policies to pursue preferential employment practices while conterminously pursuing greater societal equity by reducing governmental oversight of welfare programs. All this foreshadowed President Biden’s iteration of affirmative action—federal equity directives regarding employment preferences and greater conditions of equality. After the events described herein, Democratic Kentucky transformed itself into a Republican state.

Got Lead in Your Water? The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law May Be Poised to Help

Humans have no known safe level of exposure to lead. Blood lead levels have devastating consequences, especially for children, affecting their brain development and almost every organ in their bodies. Various government organizations have enacted measures to combat lead contamination in drinking water and its dangerous human health consequences by replacing lead service lines. At the federal level, the Environmental Protection Agency promulgated the Lead and Copper Rule Revisions, which requires states to replace lead service lines. At the state level, governments have programs to fund the replacement of lead service lines in their communities, but these funds often fall short of their needs. While these efforts have reduced the problem of lead contamination in drinking water, many of the remaining lead service lines in the U.S. are found buried under aging cities, often with low-income populations. Litigation brought by public interest groups has spurred faster replacement, but this has only been deployed in a handful of cities. The greater leverage point is increased federal funding to eradicate the problem. In 2021, the U.S. Congress passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, signed by President Biden. It included a historically large increase in supplemental funds for the replacement of lead service lines over five years. In early 2023, the Biden-Harris Administration announced a campaign to get lead out of water and accelerate the pace of the solutions. This article examines the scope of the problem of replacing lead service lines in states in the Great Lakes region, the cost estimates of financing their replacement, and the decisions states need to make now to access and effectively spend federal money from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to remove lead from the water of the nation’s disadvantaged communities.

Do Land Use Plans Affirmatively Further Fair Housing?

Problem, research strategy, and findings The 1968 Fair Housing Act required local government recipients of federal money to take meaningful actions to affirmatively further fair housing (AFFH). Current fair housing analysis requirements are copious but do not request an assessment of how land use policies affect the potential for neighborhood integration. A recent California law requires local governments to include AFFH analysis in existing planning processes, and state guidelines encourage the measurement of the spatial distribution of planned sites for low-income housing with respect to opportunity. We propose and evaluate a fair housing land use score (FHLUS) that measures whether local governments’ land use policies promote inclusion across neighborhoods. We illustrate the FHLUS by examining zoning and housing plans for three municipalities in California that differ in terms of neighborhood variation in incomes. In all three cases, we found that municipal zoning and housing plans exacerbated patterns of segregation rather than reversed them. Our metric is more precise than existing approaches, but all measures of this phenomenon will be less useful in smaller, more homogenous jurisdictions. The analysis raises important questions about the geographic scale and outcome measures for AFFH analysis and expectations for municipalities of different sizes and levels of diversity. Takeaway for practice Our metric is a useful tool for advocates and planners at all levels of government. We recommend the federal government consider incorporating it into the AFFH toolkit and practicing planners employ the measure to analyze local zoning and investment decisions. The Technical Appendix is a step-by-step guide, including an Excel formula.

Health Care Provisions in the 2022 Omnibus Appropriations Bill.

The US Constitution requires that federal money may not be spent unless appropriated by Congress. Under regular order, this is achieved by Congress passing twelve individual bills that, together, fund all the activities of the federal government. These bills must be approved by the President. The last time Congress passed all the individual bills was in 1996. Since then, the practice has been to fund the government through a series of continuing resolutions, which serve as temporary spending authorization, normally at levels from the previous fiscal year. Congress is not required to pass twelve individual appropriations bills. It may also pass a single bill to cover all spending for the fiscal year. This is generally referred to as an "omnibus spending bill". That is what was passed in December 2022. There were health policy provisions in the bill, and this article discusses some of the more relevant areas for pharmacists.

Socio-hydrology and vulnerability of levee systems along the lower Illinois River

ABSTRACT The maintenance of flood mitigation levees in the U.S. and elsewhere, has often found to be insufficient. Recent U.S. levee safety inspections have discovered substantial deficiencies in many federally monitored levees resulting in some of them being assigned an ‘unacceptable’ safety rating. Most levees in the U.S. were constructed using federal money but then were turned over to local government entities to maintain, thus socioeconomic characteristics of these communities may impact their ability to maintain their levee(s). We used dasymetric mapping to assign socioeconomic parameters to levee protected areas along the lower Illinois River to explore differences in these characteristics between communities with an unacceptable levee safety rating to those with an acceptable rating. Principal components analysis was used to determine which socioeconomic parameters explained the majority of variance between levee protected communities and the Mann-Whitney-Wilcoxon U-Test for significance testing. These analyses revealed that differences in total population , race, average per-capita income, and number of residential homes were influential indicators for explaining differences between comunities with levees with acceptable versus unacceptable ratings. These results suggest populations who inhabit levee systems with unacceptable safety ratings are white and relatively wealthier than communities located within levee systems with acceptable ratings. This finding is counter to research that shows that the poor and poorer minorities live in areas with higher flood risk. This is perhaps wealthier floodplain property owners inhabitating unacceptable levee systems may be foregoing necessary levee maintenance, inastead relying on other government programs to pay for flood damages.

Стратегирование выхода региона из дотационного экономического состояния на примере Кабардино-Балкарской Республики

Many Russian regions depend on gratuitous transfers from the federal center. These regions lag behind the average Russian level of economic development and standard of living, which creates uneven prerequisites for economic growth. In addition, such regions attract no investments, and the effectiveness of the use of federal money is often impossible to assess. These conditions lead to inequal economic development, living standards, and welfare in different regions, which creates social tension and hinders the economic growth of the whole country. The research relied on the theory of strategy and methodology of strategizing developed by V.L. Kvint, Foreign Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Honored Worker of the Higher School of the Russian Federation, whose projects have been successfully implemented in a number of regional and sectoral strategies. According to the general methodology of strategizing, new opportunities are determined by analyzing global, sectoral, and regional trends. The present research featured the subsidized region of the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic. The proposed term of subsidized economic condition made it possible to take into account the peculiarities of such regions during strategizing. The author developed some tools for assessing the effectiveness of the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic’s exit strategy from subsidized economy. The main strategic priority was to improve the quality of life in the region, as well as to increase the level of its financial independence. Conclusion. The analysis made it possible to identify and substantiate the theoretical features of strategizing the exit from subsidized economy, as well as to develop some tools for assessing the effectiveness of this strategy for the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic.

Legacies of Dust: Land Use and Labor on the Colorado Plains

Legacies of Dust: Land Use and Labor on the Colorado Plains

Author's Response

Author's Response

“Shovel-Ready”

“Shovel-Ready”

“How Much Is Not Enough?”: Public Library Outreach to “Disadvantaged” Communities in the War on Poverty

This article explores the class politics of urban public librarianship through “outreach” efforts during the federal War on Poverty, using the Chicago Public Library as a case study. Using federal money available through the Library Services and Construction Act of 1964, major metropolitan library systems spent nearly a decade opening experimental branches in “disadvantaged” Black and Latinx neighborhoods and publicizing library services to “the urban poor.” Although urban public library outreach was nothing new, this effort reflected the influence of both the civil rights movement and the short-lived national attempt to eradicate poverty, and it unearthed the same conflicts. Outreach efforts allowed activists, staff, and “disadvantaged” communities to challenge public libraries’ authoritarianism, but devastating budget cuts in a slowing economy put public libraries on the defensive in the latter half of the 1970s, leaving political conflicts in librarianship and the nation’s cities to smolder as the War on Poverty was gradually abandoned.

Potential Biden Administration Changes

Climate change was the top environmental focus during Biden's 2020 presidential campaign, so it is reasonable to assume that is where his administration's environmental efforts will be focused initially. In fact, at the time of this writing, the lead candidates for heading up the US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) all work in positions that champion ambitious climate policies. However, with coal-state senators Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) and John Barrasso (R-WY) chairing the Committee on Environment and Public Works and the Committee on Natural Resources, respectively, the Biden administration's clean energy efforts will move more slowly and rely more on regulatory options than if he had his own party controlling both bodies of Congress. For example, he will have more regulatory options than legislative options available to address greenhouse gases and vehicle efficiency standards. And while presidents do have the power of executive orders at their disposal, they have limited authority and—as we've seen the past few years—can get easily hung up in court unless very carefully crafted. Specific to water, if the Senate remains in Republican control after January's Georgia runoff elections, it is not likely we will see a major rewrite of the Safe Drinking Water Act to make it easier for USEPA to write new regulations. Either way, don't be surprised if some Republicans support efforts to streamline rule-writing to a degree. There are plenty of Republicans with contamination from per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) or lead service line issues in their states or districts, and those issues have their attention. It is likely we will see drinking water regulations issued for a handful of chemicals within the PFAS family, but probably not for the whole class of PFAS compounds. Biden is a centrist by nature, and because PFAS are used in everything from medical devices to semiconductor chips to cables, it is likely his administration will take these uses into account. The administration could require Clean Water Act permits to list PFAS releases and volumes, halt approvals of the use of new PFAS compounds, and close loopholes in existing reporting requirements. Environmental justice has been an ongoing cause for incoming vice president Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA), so expect that to get a higher profile in this administration. Enforcement of environmental regulations will also get a renewed emphasis. As for the ongoing saga of the Waters of the United States rule, the Trump administration issued a narrower definition of regulated wetlands than its predecessor, but that is hung up in court. If the Biden administration moves to change that newest definition, expect more action in the courts. This could go on for a while until the issue reaches the Supreme Court again; the court's decision in 2006, Rapanos vs. United States, opened the door to more litigation on the matter. The Trump administration also attempted to streamline the environmental permitting process by issuing new regulations under the National Environmental Policy Act. That has attracted five lawsuits so far. Since there is not time for these new regulations to take effect, the Biden administration will have the opportunity to reconsider these actions. Infrastructure spending is often seen as a tool to boost economic growth and get people employed again. A big uncertainty is the length and depth of the current economic downturn that the country is experiencing because of coronavirus impacts. If Congress feels a need to step in again this spring, infrastructure spending could be wielded as it was in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009. If this is the case, then the question will be whether to put more federal money into existing tools, such as the Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act program and the state revolving loan fund programs, or to also create new financial tools like ARRA did with Build America Bonds. The most likely course is for Congress and the administration to focus on those existing finance tools and possibly existing grant programs, such as those for lead service line removal and PFAS remediation. The past decade has not been kind to forecasters of political trends, so be prepared for developments beyond those described here. Tommy Holmes is director of legislative affairs at the AWWA Government Affairs Office in Washington, D.C. He can be reached at tholmes@awwa.org.

Money, Power, and Radical Honesty: A Look At Members of Congress' Use of Information for Financial Gain

Cleared of wrongdoing due to lack of evidence, Senators Kelley Loeffler and David Perdue continued their bids for re-election, and control of the Senate, in the Georgia run-off. Both Senators Loeffler and Perdue traded stocks in the run-up to the COVID-19 crisis after receiving classified briefings. These are just two of many instances of members of Congress profiting after receiving classified information. While the American public remained uninformed as to the true crisis looming as COVID-19 spread, members of Congress received private briefings and quietly sold securities such as travel and hotel related interests, and purchased other securities, such as remote-work software and medical equipment related interests.Many members of Congress also profit from federal money earmarked to increase the value of their personal land deals, from access to IPOs, and from corporate board seats. While corporate executives, members of the executive branch, and ordinary citizens are subject to strict insider trading laws, members of Congress sail through loopholes and exceptions that are hand-crafted for their benefit. This article reviews proposals for fixing the problem before proposing a comprehensive solution focused on limiting the financial opportunities for members of Congress and strict reporting requirements.While many proposals to address this problem exist, none come close to preventing members of Congress from profiting in these often-nefarious ways. To ensure that members of Congress work on behalf of the American Public—and not their own pocketbooks—the comprehensive and drastic reform articulated in this article is required.

It Takes a Coalition: The Community Impacts of Collaboration

Members of Congress frequently collaborate on policy initiatives, reaching out to colleagues in both parties to find common ground on solutions for the problems faced by their constituents. Using a novel dataset of over 30,000 “Dear Colleague” letters sent by members of the 111th Congress, I use the collaborative relationships that exist in the earliest stages of the policy process to measure the social influence of legislators. I demonstrate that districts represented by members of Congress who are better connected to their colleagues receive a greater share of federal grant money. I argue that this is because collaborative legislators are well‐positioned to be influential allies to strategic bureaucrats who want to maintain a broad base of support for their programs in Congress. Thus, devoting resources to building relationships with their colleagues is one way members of Congress can more effectively support the communities they represent.

Sticky Policies, Dysfunctional Systems: Path Dependency and the Problems of Government Funding for Science in the United States

Leaders of the scientific community have declared that American science is in a crisis due to inadequate federal funding. They misconstrue the problem; its roots lie instead in the institutional interactions between federal funding agencies and higher education. After World War II, science policy elites advocated for a system of funding that addressed what they perceived at the time as their most pressing problems of science-government relations: the need for greater federal funding for science, especially to universities, while maintaining scientific autonomy in the distribution and use of those funds. The agencies that fund university research developed institutional rules, norms, and procedures that created unintended consequences when they interacted with those of American higher education. The project system for funding, justified by peer-review and coupled with rapidly increasing R&D budgets, created incentives for universities to expand their research programs massively, which led to unsustainable growth in the demand for federal research money. That system produced spectacular successes but also created the unintended longer-term problem that demand for science funding has grown more quickly than government funding ever could. Most analysts neglect potentially painful reforms that might address these problems. This case demonstrates that successful political coalitions can create intractable long-term problems for themselves.

Responding to the Economic Impacts of Coronavirus: A Proposed Oregon Economic Recovery and Resilience Framework

In this white paper, we have gathered thoughts on how policymakers, economic development professionals, and other stakeholders can organize around economic continuity and recovery during the COVID-19 pandemic. Even as communities are still dealing with the immediate health impacts, businesses are shuttered, and the initial wave of federal money flows in, local governments should start planning for recovery now. To jumpstart planning, we offer a framework for organizing longerterm continuity and recovery activities. We stop short of recommending specific objectives or actions. Those should be regionally identified and should be vertically implemented at all levels. Effective continuity and recovery efforts will require an unprecedented level of collaboration across a spectrum of public and private economic development partners. We are aware that some regions and local governments are already implementing some of the strategies discussed in this paper. We encourage others to consider them, understanding there is no single structure that will work for everyone. We also recognize that we are in a very fluid time and events are evolving rapidly. We share these thoughts in the spirit of learning of learning together as we go. We hope that it will open up productive conversations that lead to improved collaboration during recovery and beyond. We’re all in this together.

The Great American Health Care System and the Dire Need for Change

The Great American Health Care System and the Dire Need for Change

Crackdown on undisclosed foreign ties impacts higher ed

The U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Massachusetts announced on Jan. 28 that Harvard University Professor Charles Lieber, Ph.D., was arrested and charged with a crime for allegedly lying to the U.S. government about his ties with China in connection with the application and receipt of federal grant money. This charge is the latest example of the U.S. government's crackdown on undisclosed university ties to China.

Addressing the Health Needs of the Uninsured: One Community's Solution.

Providing high-quality health care to poor and uninsured individuals has been a challenge to the US health care system for decades. Often, patients do not seek care until they are in a crisis, or they seek care at a health care system while not addressing their primary care needs. To report on a community that has sought to change this dynamic with the development of an all-volunteer practitioner-run clinic model. Perspective on a successful volunteer-run safety-net clinic. Volunteers in Medicine on Hilton Head Island, SC, provides free health care, with more than 28,000 eligible patient visits annually, for the underserved population. This clinic is self-funded through donations and charity events and accepts no federal money. The patients are not asked to pay a fee for service. Most medical specialties are represented at the clinic, and many partnerships are in place for referrals for more advanced procedures such as surgery. All health care clinicians are volunteers, including physicians, nurses, dentists, and mental health professionals. The quality of care meets or exceeds national recommendations on many measurements, including mammography and Papanicolaou test screening rates. Safety-net clinics such as Volunteers in Medicine are a needed and viable option to the provision of health care to the vulnerable, often unseen members of society.

Crackdown on undisclosed foreign ties impacts higher ed

The U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Massachusetts announced on Jan. 28 that Harvard University Professor Charles Lieber, Ph.D., was arrested and charged with a crime for allegedly lying to the U.S. government about his ties with China in connection with the application and receipt of federal grant money. This charge is the latest example of the U.S. government's crackdown on undisclosed university ties to China and illustrates the consequences for lack of candor.

New charges against Kansas chemist

US prosecutors filed a new indictment Jan. 15 against University of Kansas chemist Feng “Franklin” Tao. Tao was previously charged with one count of wire fraud and three counts of program fraud for allegedly receiving US federal grant money while also employed by Fuzhou University in China as a Changjiang Distinguished Professor. The recent indictment supersedes the previous one. Tao is now charged with two counts of wire fraud for submitting false conflict of interest forms electronically for the University of Kansas. He is also charged with one count of program fraud because he “embezzled, stole, and obtained by fraud, property worth at least $5,000,” the indictment alleges. A motion to dismiss the original indictment filed by Tao’s attorneys on Nov. 17 claims that a “disgruntled, unpaid visiting scholar at KU” tried to extort $300,000 from Tao, then hacked into his email and “fabricated complaints” to KU and the Federal