March 2003: Bush Administration Withdraws Reports of Federal Allocations of Monies to States; Decision Impairs States’ Ability to Track Damage from Budget Cuts

The Bush administration announces that it will no longer publish an annual report that details how much money each state receives from each federal program. The announcement coincides with heavily critical reports that federal budget cuts are creating huge shortfalls in state budgets. Without the annual report, it is now much harder to track how the budget cuts affect individual states. An administration spokesman says the information is still available, albeit in “a different mode,” from individual information releases from the separate agencies, but Congressional Democrats accuse the administration of trying to hide the damages caused by the budget cuts. [Savage, 2007, pp. 104-105]