Agency machinery and intergovernmental relations covered directly: reorganizations, funding formulas, appointments and jurisdictional disputes.
Most federal regulations must be proposed in public, opened to written comment from anyone, and justified in writing before they take effect. Here is the sequence, the deadlines, and what makes a comment worth reading.
Counties run elections, courts, jails, roads, and property assessment for about 3,000 local jurisdictions — the layer of government most Americans interact with without noticing it.
Federal disaster help starts with a governor's request: the Stafford Act lets the president issue two kinds of declarations, and which one lands determines what assistance survivors and governments can get.
Schools, water plants, and fire stations are built on borrowed money: municipal bonds fund local construction, and the repayment source — taxes or user fees — is written into the bond's name.
A compact is a binding contract between states, approved by Congress, that creates shared agencies for problems no single state can solve — rivers, ports, prisons, and driver records.
Every competitive-service federal job starts with an announcement on USAJobs, a questionnaire that decides your rank among applicants, and a certificate of eligible candidates the hiring manager must work from.