Capitalizing in the Nation’s Capital: Matching State and Regional Resources to Administration Funding Priorities

Authors

John Hudak, Governance StudiesFollow

Document Type

Lecture

Publication Date

3-12-2013

Publisher

Brookings Mountain West

Abstract

This presentation explores the relationship between the funding and policy priorities established by presidential administrations and the financial resources provided to individual states and regions. Information gathered from a newly compiled database of all federal project grants from 1996-2008 helps illuminate the distribution of money across the 50 states. These data are complemented by field research in federal and state bureaucracies. Would you be surprised to learn that the executive branch delivers more money and grants to swing states than all other states? Furthermore, the proximity of a presidential election further enhances this preference to deliver funds to swing states. In addition, presidents target funds to specific issues and project ideas/themes in ways that have clear geographic distributional effects. The paper concludes that presidential electoral interest drives the distribution of federal funds and that states—and particularly states in the Intermountain West region—can capitalize on these policy forces in ways that assist state and local economies.

Keywords

Elections; Federal aid; Grants-in-aid; Politics; Practical; Subsidies; U.S. states

Disciplines

American Politics | Law | Law and Politics | Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration

File Format

pdf

File Size

328 KB

Streaming Media

Language

English

Comments

Greenspun Hall, UNLV Campus

Video File size: 152 megabytes

Attached file: 20 PowerPoint slides

Repository Citation

Hudak, J. (2013). Capitalizing in the Nation’s Capital: Matching State and Regional Resources to Administration Funding Priorities.
Available at: https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/brookings_lectures_events/49