MODELS OF FEDERALISM This researc

The case study examines various post-World War II attempts to alter the balance between federal and state power in the American federal system by reducing national activities and separating federal and state functions. These included recommendations made by various presidential commissions under the administrations of Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, the most important of which was the Joint Federal-State Action Committee (1957-1959) (the Joint Committee), and Ronald Reagan's New Federalism. The case study analysis reveals that such attempts largely failed. The Joint Committee recommended that only two functions be left to the states (through the elimination of national grants), vocational education and municipal waste treatment plants, which together amounted to less than $80 million in annual spending and about 2 percent of national grants (Case Study 105). The recommendations met with opposition from Congress, the federal agencies concerned, and after means of financing such programs locally failed to develop, from many state governors as well. The case analysis predicted a similar

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s under control in the late 19th and early 20th century originated in the states. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said "it is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory, and try novel social and economic experiments without risks to the rest of the country" (Fronmayer 74). Under the New Deal and later 20th century administrations, the federal government took the lead in introducing new regulatory and social legislation. However, by the late 1970s or early 1980s, various concerns were expressed as to the need to develop a new model of federalism: 1. Many federal programs were perceived as having become too large, cumbersome, duplicative and costly to be effective. 2. The federal government through the leverage it gained by its taxing powers and its grants in aid to the states and the conditions it attached to that aid exercised coercive powers over states and localities which were inhibiting local initiative and drying up local sources of funds. As federal deficits grew in the 1980s and early 1990s, states became saddled with unfunded federal mandates they could not afford to satisfy. 3. The traditional argument that states lacked s
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Approximate Word count = 1886
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)