Rural Counties Have 16% of Of Agencies, USDA Provides Of Development Categories: Our work showed that, for the programs for which rural share data (for fiscal year 1985) were available, about 17 percent of federal domestic funding went directly to rural counties, where about 16 percent of the U.S. population resides. of 15 primary federal departments and agencies, USDA had the highest average-about 50 percent--of program funds going directly to rural counties. For the development categories that we devised for purposes of this review, rural shares, on the average, ranged from a high of 60 percent for programs in the agriculture/natural resources category to a low of 5 percent for programs in the human resources category. Federal Programs Divided Into Data Include Both Loans and Amounts Shown Represent The rural share of federal funding was calculated for each program listed in the CFFR for fiscal year 1985 as the percentage of total program funding going directly to those counties defined as rural (i.e., counties in Beale codes 6 through 9), using the following formula: rural $/total $ = rural share (percent). About 16 percent of the U.S. population resides in rural counties; thus when the rural share of program funding exceeds 16 percent, the rural share per person exceeds the national share per person. Conversely, when the rural share is less than 16 percent, the rural share per person falls below the national share. Rural share information for federal agencies and for what we call development categories is shown on the following pages. (Rural shares for individual programs, by agency, are presented in app. II. App. III presents similar data by development category.) 93 percent of the federal funds for fiscal year 1985 to the county level, but many programs were excluded because their expenditures could not be reliably traced to the county level. For these programs, we were unable to estimate rural shares. The data in this section include funding for both loans (to be repaid) and grants, direct payments, and other expenditures (not repaid). The dollar amounts are taken, in most cases, from the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance and represent budget data for fiscal year 1987 reported by the agencies to the General Services Administration. We did not audit these data; therefore they should be viewed as estimates of program size and not as precise budget amounts. We calculated the rural share using the fiscal year 1985 CFFR data, which were the most recent available at the time of our review. (Apps. II and III contain separate funding information for loan (and insurance) programs and for programs involving grants, direct payments, and other expenditures.) We began compiling our list of federal programs by using Census' CFFR data base for fiscal year 1985. As noted previously, the CFFR provides funding data down to the county level, but does not include a number of programs. Therefore, we obtained information on additional programs from the Catalog. We assigned each program to one of six development categories, which we devised for purposes of this review and which are shown in table 3.1. (A seventh category--defense--was initially included, but was not retained because it did not fit our definition of developmentrelated programs.) 1Reid and Dubin. development objectives, while agriculture/natural resources, infrastructure, and human resource programs have both economic development and other objectives (such as equity), and general entitlement and special group programs have objectives other than economic development. In compiling our list of programs, we generally excluded those programs for which the Catalog showed only "salaries and expenses," since such programs did not provide direct economic assistance. Instead, these programs tend to provide such services as technical assistance or similar noneconomic aid. |