Unfunded mandates

Someone made an excellent point over the weekend: that the waivers to use CDBG and HOME money for disaster relief (see below), and other waivers that allow emergency re-use of housing that was subsidized with the goal of relieving conventional poverty, are a kind of unfunded mandate. That is, federal grant money that had previously been awarded to serve already-existing needs will now get diverted to the Katrina recovery effort -- and since it is, after all, federal money, it will look like federal generosity. But actually it'll be the generosity of state and local grantees and their clients who are giving up what would otherwise have been their share.