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An unfunded mandate is, fundamentally, a law that requires local or state governments to take on certain responsibilities or actions without providing the necessary funding. In effect, it imposes the cost on someone else and, in the final analysis, it is often the local taxpayers who end up footing the bill.

So, it is no surprise that tempers are boiling over at the offices of government agencies and entities at all levels as budget managers are scrambling to make ends meet in the midst of Uncle Sam's never-ending barrage of new laws and regulations which impose extraordinary, unaffordable, and unsustainable, costs on the people.

You would think the current state of the U.S. economy would change Uncle Sam's obsession with forcing his unfunded ideas on the rest of the country.

As a result, Uncle Sam is on the verge of turning the "American Dream" into the biggest, unfunded mandate on earth as he continues to expand his control over just about every aspect of each person's business and private life - but fails over and over again to figure out who's going to pay for it.

In his Washington Post article on March 17, 2005, columnist David Broder talked about Senator Lamar Alexander's comments in a bitter senate debate over the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act of 1995 (UMRA):

He noted that the National Conference of State Legislatures "has identified $29 billion in federal cost shifts to states in transportation, health care, education, environment, homeland security, election laws and in other areas." The ability of elected officials to manage their own budgets has been further narrowed by the proliferation of federal court consent decrees, which, he said, now dictate how "to run Medicaid in Tennessee, to run foster care in Utah, to run transportation in Los Angeles and to decide how to teach English to children in New York City."

That was 1995 and this is 2009.

Do you think things have gotten better or worse?

- Ed Smith, Publisher
The EHS Letter Manual