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The conditional spending power, or the ability of Congress & the Executive branch to attach conditions to grants in aid & entitlement programs, has become a vital source of authority to monitor & regulate the activates of both the states & individual citizens. If there were meaningful political or legal limits upon the conditional spending power, it would be no more problematic than any of the other policy mechanisms available for achieving federal ends, but such limits presently do not exist. As a consequence, conditional aid may function to promote state sovereignty & the rights of citizenship, but it also may serve to undermine them. Contrary to recent developments ostensibly limiting the reach of federal regulatory authority, arguably coercive & even unconstitutional applications of conditional aid are supported & encouraged by both the federal judiciary & contemporary politics. This article explains how & why this is the case, & assesses prospects for reform. Adapted from the source document.

There is perhaps no topic that has generated more sustained interest and controversy in the United States during the past three decades than the public policies called "entitlements." From the Great Society innovations of the 1960s to the guaranteed income plan of the 1970s to the "health security" proposal of the early 1990s, debate over the issue of which U.S. citizens should be entitled to what kind of national-level benefits has been a constant in American political life. Though consensus has occasionally been reached, moments of accord have been fragile and fleeting. Late 1995 and early 1996 found both President William Clinton and a large, bipartisan majority of Congress targeting poor Americans and their benefits, advocating an "end to welfare as we know it." Yet interbranch disagreement over the way that "welfare" reform should be implemented reached such heights that the annual U.S. budget development process broke down, resulting in repeated shutdowns of government agencies and the threat that, for the first time in the history of the American nation, the United States would default on its obligations to its creditors.

The ability to attach conditions to federal financial aid has contributed significantly to the establishment of federal hegemony in policymaking, allowing Congress and the executive branch to exact from those dependent upon government largesse behavior which could not be compelled through direct legislation. While questions concerning the legitimacy of conditional spending in our federal system are properly directed to the courts, problems inherent in the judicial review of allocational decisions make constitutional challenges of the national spending power no more likely to succeed in the future than they have in the past. Thus, for all practical purposes, the balance of power between levels of government as well as the rights of individual citizens may be permanently impaired.