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Writer's pictureTom Cochran

ARPA Passes House with S&L Gov't $$ Included! See the Updated Allocations Here:

The House has just approved what started out as a Budget Reconciliation Resolution but somewhere along the way transformed into an actual bill called the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021(ARPA)With the state and local assistance provisions I last posted about as "Title V of the Reconciliation Resolution" now being subsumed within Title IX of ARPA along with the $1400 direct Economic Impact Payments to taxpayers and man other more famous big deal components. Here's a good title-by-title summary of the entire bill produced recently by the Senate Democrats. In the transformation of the Reconciliation Resolution into Senate bill language, some refinements were made to the state and local assistance funds package, according to this summary sent to me a few days ago by the excellent Marcia Howard Executive Director of the Federal Funds Information Service in Washington:

And so naturally updated estimates of state-by-state and locality by locality allocations have also been made and here they are so you too can nerd-out to your heart's content in them. I even found an estimate for our NJ township:

I will leave it to any of you dear fellow nerds with more computational and graphic band-width than I have (and the wherewithal to by the data from UI) to see how these allocations seem to match up with the fiscal needs of states which have suffered pandemic-related tax and fee revenue shortfalls, as reported by Dr. Lucy Dadayan of the Urban Institute and as reported on by Mary Williams Walsh last week in the NYTimes.


In any case it's now on to the President's desk for signature and the responsible federal agencies for execution, (principally the Treasury Department, which gets $50MM to administer this relatively ginormous and fairly complex intergovernmental transfer program). It's been a long and difficult fight for and by the states and localities, but this is a win-win moment in the long and tortured history of US fiscal federalism to be celebrated, at least by those who can set aside partisan ideology and culture wars distraction and recognize that the federal government can accomplish very little in the field of domestic policy without partnering with those sub-national levels of government.

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