Guidelines for social services grants

Guidelines for spending federal grants to the states for social services changed repeatedly between 1962 and 1975. The process of preparing guidelines changed, and so did their content. These changes are described and explained. Guidelines at all stages failed to provide intelligible and useful instructions to federal and state administrators. In part this was because the contextual supports that normally help to give effect to grant-in-aid guidelines—explicit antecedents in the law, and implicit understandings among administrators at different levels of the federal system—were lacking or seriously defective. Beyond that, in each of their different phases the guidelines proved untenable because of dysfunctions that may have been peculiar to the respective processes by which they were prepared.The trustees, officers, and other staff members of The Brookings Institution have no responsibility for the contents of this paper.