ABSTRACT
The administration of a 'single' domestic policy often involves a pastiche of public administrators, and this is known as intergovernmental relations, or the series of financial, legal, political, and administrative relationships established among all units of government that possess varying degrees of authority and jurisdictional autonomy. The United States, of course, has a federal system of governance, which refers to a union of national and subnational governments, with distinct or shared responsibilities assigned to each governmental level. National fiscal decentralization associates with fewer public employees in the national government, but also with more employees in subnational governments and in total. Most fundamentally, the Constitution establishes separate identities for the nation and the states. The Constitution recognizes only two levels of government: national and state. Hence, the terms, 'layer cake federalism' and 'dual federalism', indicating that, during the nation's first 143 years, the federal and state governments stuck to their very separate knitting.
