Resumen de Leaving Money on the Table: Learning from Recent Refusals of Federal Grants in the American States
Recent years have been marked by high-profile refusals of federal grant aid by state governments. These refusals raise several questions. First, is there anything new here? Second, does partisanship alone explain these decisions? And finally, do the explanations for recent decisions provide insights into state behavior over the longer term? This article reviews state refusals of federal money over the past fifty years, explores the degree to which partisanship can explain recent grant refusals, and uses those insights to predict state-level applications to three very different grant programs. The results suggest that there is little novelty in recent events and that the interaction of partisan and electoral pressures has been influencing state-level applications for grants-in-aid for decades.
