One Man, One Grant: Equity in Federal Aid to States

Abstract

Policy makers in Washington are moving swiftly to change the way federal funds flow to states. This paper describes several diagnostic tools that analysts can use to evaluate the distributional fairness of both existing and proposed approaches to federal grants-in-aid. When the tools are applied to four small grant programs in the Department °f Health and Human Services, the results suggest that capped programs are more equitable than open-ended programs. The author argues for wider use of these diagnostic techniques to evaluate the equity of various federal funding vehicles.