Federal Assistance in The United States - Federal Assistance Programs

Federal Assistance Programs

In order to provide Federal assistance in an organized manner, the federal government provides assistance through federal agencies. It is the agency’s responsibility to adequately provide assistance, as well as manage, account, and monitor the responsible use of federal funds which were utilized for that assistance. The agencies then supply the assistance to beneficiaries (known as recipients, see below), such as States, hospitals, poverty-stricken families, etc., through hundreds of individual programs. These programs are defined by the federal government as: “any function of a Federal agency that provides assistance or benefits for: (1) a State or States, territorial possession, county, city, other political subdivision, grouping, or instrumentality thereof; (2) any domestic profit or nonprofit corporation or institution; or (3) an individual; other than an agency of the Federal government”.

Therefore, programs (or “functions”) can refer to any number of activities or services provided by agencies, such as building a bridge, providing food or medicine vouchers to the poor, or providing counseling to violence victims. Programs are assigned to offices within a federal agency and may include administrative personnel which work directly or indirectly with the program.

Each program is created with a specific purpose and has unique operations and activities, (i.e., no program is made for the same purpose and to operate the same way as a previously existing program) and it is assigned an official name for which to differentiate them from each other. A program may be called by a different term than its official name by the general public, by an entity, or even by law or regulation; such as by the type of activity or service it engages, by a specific project name (e.g., the Big Dig tunnel project), or any other similar term. This type of name, title or term given to a program is called the “popular name”. However, the official name of program is standardized within the federal government so that federal agencies can maintain better accountability of their assigned assistance.

For example, an individual who receives rent assistance payments through the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher program might not know the exact official name of the program, and may simply call it the “rent subsidizing” program, due to its type of activity or service. However, since there are many other rent subsidizing programs provided by the federal government, standard program names must be maintained in order to differentiate them. In this case, programs such as Supportive Housing for the Elderly (Sec. 202), which is a project-based rental assistance program exclusively for the elderly and Section 8 Housing Assistance Payments Program-Special Allocations, a rent assistance program usually tied to public housing projects, also engage in the activity of rent subsidizing.