1. United States
2. Letter

FORMAL DEMAND FOR RESTRUCTURING OF INTERGOVERNMENTAL FUNDING
Interest-Bearing, Publicly Voted Grants from Districts to States and from States to the Federal Level From:
Melissa Samantha DuVall To:
your honorable Justices;The current flow of public $ is inverted and unaccountable. Federal transfers and state allocations move downward as free or lightly conditioned grants. Districts and local governments receive funds without having to justify them upward as formal requests, without popular vote on the specific packages, and without any obligation to repay principal or interest to the people whose labor produced the money. This structure treats tax dollars as endless transfer fuel rather than scarce public capital. The result is the apparatus we have already measured: tens of millions of people whose pay and benefits depend on public money, while the productive base that funds them remains limited and increasingly strained. I therefore demand the following structural change: 1 Districts must initiate. Every request for state funds shall originate as a formal written grant or loan application from the district (or equivalent local unit) to the state. No top-down allocation of discretionary or formula funds shall occur without such an application. 2 State management. Once approved, the governor (or the designated state executive authority) shall be responsible for the administration and oversight of the expenditure. 3 Popular vote. Every such grant or loan package above a modest threshold shall be subject to approval or rejection by the voters of the state in a regular or special election. The people of the state hold the final decision on whether their money will be loaned for that purpose. 4 Interest requirement. All approved funds shall carry recurring interest at a rate no lower than the prevailing rate charged by private lenders for comparable public-purpose borrowing. Interest and principal shall be repaid into the state treasury for the benefit of the taxpayers. Non-repayment shall trigger foreclosure proceedings 5 Federal transfers reclassified. The same principles shall apply to federal funds flowing to states. Federal grants and transfers shall be restructured as interest-bearing loans from the people of the United States, subject to state-level public approval where practicable, and repayable with interest into the federal treasury. Free, non-repayable transfers that expand administrative layers without measurable return shall be phased out. Public money is the people’s money. Banks and private lenders demand interest when they loan capital to individuals. The people have the same right when their capital is loaned to any level of government. Anything less continues the practice of throwing finite tax resources at expenditures that do not have to earn their keep. That practice has already produced an imbalance measured in tens of millions of publicly funded positions and trillions in annual outlays. It’s not working.