Rethink the Influence of the President and Congress in Federal Funds Allocation

• In Event: Perspectives on American Political Economy

Abstract

Distributive politics scholars have long examined the goals and strategies of the president and Congress in the federal fiscal process in past decades. Presidential scholars have found the president’s particularistic spending allocation favors co-partisan members (Berry, Burden, and Howell 2010, Dynes and Huber 2015, Kriner and Reeves 2015), while Congress scholars have found that members’ individual characteristics (committee, leadership position, and seniority) and partisanship (majority party or presidential party) matter in terms of receiving pork benefits (Clemens et al. 2015, Berry and Fowler 2016). Although scholars have found a politicized pattern of federal funds allocation, they have failed to answer the question of how much members receive compared to how much their districts need because they have not considered the demand side in their analysis.
In order to address this problem, we have created the grant-need index by grant and Congressional district. By analyzing the grant objectives and application criteria for 230 block and project grants from the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA), we calculate the fair grant amount that should be allocated to the districts from 2005 to 2020. Then, we re-investigate the president’s particularism and member effects in the federal grant process. By using the dependent variable as the difference between the fair grant amount and the actual receipt amount, we can estimate the effects of the president and Congress more precisely in the federal fiscal process.

Authors

• Heonuk Ha, University of Southern California

• Jeffery A. Jenkins, University of Southern California