AP Essay #1: Federalism, Mandates, and Devolution

In the government, there are a number of programs in which the national government engages in regulated federalism by imposing national standards on the states without providing any funding at all. These fundings are called "unfunded mandates," which are formally defined as national standards or programs imposed on state and local governments by the federal government without accompanying funding or reimbursement. The states complained against this form of regulated federalism because they claimed that mandates took up so much of their budgets that they were not able to set their own priorities. The burden of unfunded mandates became a major rallying cry of the 1994 Republican Congress' Contract with America. One of the first measures adopted by the 104th Republican Congress in 1995 was an act to limit unfunded mandates known as the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act (UMRA). Considered both a triumph of lobbying efforts by state and local governments and a renewal of federalism, this law stated that any mandate with an uncompensated state and local cost estimated at greater than $50 million a year, as determined by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), can be stopped by a point of order raised on the House or Senate floor. Although it reduced the cost of mandates, the primary impact of the "stop, look, and listen" requirement of the UMRA came not as the affirmative blockage of mandate legislation, but rather, as an expert put it, from "its effect as a deterrent to mandates in the drafting and early consideration of legislation." The act was therefore not a revolutionary answer to the problem of unfunded mandates. The act does, however, represent a serious effort to move the national-state relationship a bit further toward the state side. The UMRA differs from devolution in the sense that the UMRA still places authority in the hands of the federal government. Devolution is defined as a policy to remove a program from one level of government by deregulating it or passing it down to a lower level of government, such as from the national government to the state and local governments. Devolution and "new federalism" would be more effective at reducing unfunded mandates in actual practice because more authority is given to the state governments through block grants, which rival and replace unfunded mandates, and which also simultaneously reduce the costs placed on the state governments because the national government covers some, if not all, of the costs when they are used. Also, the UMRA did not actually reduce unfunded mandates. Instead, it only lowered the costs of the mandates and caused the mandates to be reviewed longer in the drafting and early consideration of legislation. Therefore, devolution and block grants should be used as the primary method to reduce unfunded mandates.