Pursuant to the General Welfare Clause, Congress may impose obligations on the States as a condition of their receiving federal funding.

The Supreme Court has suggested that federal grants conditioned on compliance with federal directives might be illegitimate if the conditions share no relationship to the federal interest in particular national projects or programs.

In Dole, the Supreme Court held that Congress' act in conditioning a grant of federal highway funds to South Dakota on the State's adoption of a minimum drinking age of 21 was a valid exercise of Congress' spending power

Congress attempted to induce states to adopt a minimum drinking age of twenty-one years by threatening to cut five percent of federal highway funding to those states that failed to do so.

X. It is well-established, however, that "Congress may attach conditions to the receipt of federal funds, and has repeatedly employed the power `to further broad policy objectives by conditioning receipt of federal moneys upon compliance by the recipient with federal statutory and administrative directives.'"

Dole counseled that "in some circumstances the financial inducement offered by Congress might be so coercive as to pass the point at which pressure turns into compulsion."

But Congress may not "induce" the recipient "to engage in activities that would themselves be unconstitutional."

Under the Spending Clause, Congress can set conditions on expenditures, even though it might be powerless to compel a state to comply under the enumerated powers in Article I.

Fourth, "other constitutional provisions may provide an independent bar to the conditional grant of federal funds."

Recent decisions have recognized that "[t] he level of deference to the congressional decision is such that the Court has more recently questioned whether `general welfare'is a judicially enforceable restriction at all. "