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Syllabus
the States to burden interstate commerce. The Secretary's collection of a percentage of the surcharge is no more than a federal tax on interstate commerce, which petitioners do not claim to be an invalid exercise of either Congress' commerce or taxing power. Finally, in conditioning the States' receipt of federal funds upon their achieving specified milestones, Congress has not exceeded its Spending Clause authority in any of the four respects identified by this Court in Dole, supra, at 207-208. Petitioners' objection to the form of the expenditures as nonfederal is unavailing, since the Spending Clause has never been construed to deprive Congress of the power to collect money in a segregated trust fund and spend it for a particular purpose, and since the States' ability largely to control whether they will pay into the escrow account or receive a share was expressly provided by Congress as a method of encouraging them to regulate according to the federal plan. Pp. 171-173.
(f) The Act's access incentives constitute a conditional exercise of Congress' commerce power along the lines of that approved in Hodel, supra, at 288, and thus do not intrude on the States' Tenth Amendment sovereignty. These incentives present nonsited States with the choice either of regulating waste disposal according to federal standards or having their waste-producing residents denied access to disposal sites. They are not compelled to regulate, expend any funds, or participate in any federal program, and they may continue to regulate waste in their own way if they do not accede to federal direction. Pp. 173-174. (g) Because the Act's take title provision offers the States a "choice" between the two unconstitutionally coercive alternatives— either accepting ownership of waste or regulating according to Congress' instructions—the provision lies outside Congress' enumerated powers and is inconsistent with the Tenth Amendment. On the one hand, either forcing the transfer of waste from generators to the States or requiring the States to become liable for the generators' damages would "commandeer" States into the service of federal regulatory purposes. On the other hand, requiring the States to regulate pursuant to Congress' direction would present a simple unconstitutional command to implement legislation enacted by Congress. Thus, the States' "choice" is no choice at all. Pp. 174-177. (h) The United States' alternative arguments purporting to find limited circumstances in which congressional compulsion of state regulation is constitutionally permissible—that such compulsion is justified where the federal interest is sufficiently important; that the Constitution does, in some circumstances, permit federal directives to state governments; and that the Constitution endows Congress with the power
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