They call for greater recognition in the national policies, which negatively affect the goals (Zeemering, 2007).
Taking a critical perspective, I find the Federalism and intergovernmental relations to be undemocratic. This system propagated the tendency towards executive dominance in the American system. It further limits the senate and the legislatures. In spite of the increasing number of open conferences, the process has stringent measures to reinforce the government secrecy. As a result, it ends up contaminating the transparency and accountability of governments to the public.
The process of federalism and intergovernmental relations has many other costs associated to it. So much bureaucratic resources are set aside to operating the process itself. The necessity of constant and frequent consultation cause delays, uncertainty, and unpredictability of major decisions that may require urgent solutions. The process itself dominated the significance of policy. For instance, much time is spent finding out who will perform a given task, who will carry on the cost, who will get credit, or who will be blamed in case of failure. This confusion goes on at the expense of finding out what needs to be done.
The overwhelming demands taking into account both the state and local interests' ends up frustrating consultations that are a necessity in advanced stated. These consultations are between governments and the functional interests, business and labor. Both local and state governments have increased such consultations in the recent years...
Once more oriented to the minimal statistics gathering and funding assistance between more or less watertight compartments, intergovernmental relations (IGR) has evolved into dynamic and highly integrated sets of behaviors, not only between agents of government but among a host of non-governmental actors, non-profit and for-profit." (Agranoff, 2008) Agranoff states that intergovernmental relations appear to have started with "the territorial organization of states, often termed in international nomenclature as
For example, we could consider a local agricultural project. The local and state expertise in determining what are the right decisions to be made on this project should be more useful and in a more timely manner than decisions that could be made at a federal level. In the current security and economic environment, the answer is probably somewhere mid-way between all the notions previously presented. From this perspective, a
This program requires the states to create their own safety standards and to implement their rail safety oversight and audit programs in measuring compliance to that program. But the diversity of legal authorities, budgets and staff levels of oversight agencies would not allow this to happen smoothly (Caruso). The proposed Public Transportation Safety Program Act of 2009 hoped to authorize the Department of Transportation to establish the minimum safety standards
However, post-Reconstruction, 'states rights' often became a code word for Jim Crow legislation. Southern states demanded the 'right' for the majority to engage in de facto segregation of schools and to institute limits upon how voting rights were exercised. Many Americans do not know that the Bill of Rights originally was only intended to govern the actions of the federal government, not the states. "The debate over whether the Fourteenth
Still, state and local governments must realize that unfunded mandates will still occur, and when that happens, federal resources must be made available to state and local governments in order to help them make responsible financial decisions. Thus, an advisory board should be put into place to assist state and local governments in dealing with unfunded federal mandates as a further bridge in the communication gap between these two
CASE 3: REINSTATEMENT OF THE ADVISORY COMMISSION ON INTERGOVERNMENTAL RELATIONS (ACIR)INTRODUCTIONThe U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (ACIR) was a nonpartisan agency that provided research and recommendations on intergovernmental relations to the President, Congress, and state and local officials. It was established in 1959 and abolished in 1996 (Chi, 2004). Its mission was �to strengthen the American federal system and improve the ability of federal, state, and local governments to
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