Can the Cities be Trusted? The Community Development Experience
Federal programs to aid the cities have for decades faced a double dilemma. On the political side, efforts to pursue national policy goals have clashed with demands for local autonomy. Mayors have protested the constraints imposed by the irresistible lure of federal money (although few cities have sent the money back). Yet both elected and appointed officials at the federal level have distrusted the cities' commitment to national goals. On the administrative side, doubts about the ability of the federal government to distribute money free of excessive costs, particularly those caused by inflexibility and red tape, have encountered concerns about the ability of the cities to spend federal money effectively and efficiently. By the late 1960s the nation's mayors were complaining that federal grant programs had produced a dangerous mix of these political and administrative problems: too much federal control over local policy accompanied by too many regulations, too little flexibility, and too little coordination among programs. The solution of the seventies was the block grant, a strategy conceived in the mid-sixties but advanced on a broad scale by Richard Nixon's New Federalism. The block grants would improve the delivery of aid to the cities, Nixon said, by distributing aid according to a formula measuring "need" (instead of having cities compete for project grants), by vesting responsibility for the grants in elected officials (instead of administrative officials who dominated the categoricals at the local level), and by allowing the cities to-use the money over