It’s an old gripe, but one with an increasingly large price tag: States say they’re now paying at least $29 billion for programs that Washington launched but did not fully fund — including education, prescription drugs, homeland security and more.

Similar complaints a decade ago spurred a federal law reining in the practice. But loopholes mean the buck is being passed more and more, state leaders said Wednesday as they called on the Bush administration and Congress to use the federal budget to set things right.

“It feels like the late 1980s and ’90s all over again,” said Utah House Speaker Marty Stephens, a Republican and president of the National Conference of State Legislatures. “States’ own budget programs and priorities are being supplanted by federal spending priorities.”

But watchdogs in Congress and others have questioned whether states overhype allegations of so-called unfunded mandates, noting that many programs are voluntary.

A report released Wednesday from the NCSL, a bipartisan group of state lawmakers, said the $29.7-billion estimate was conservative, and the total could be as much as three times higher. It accounted for 6 percent of states’ total general fund spending.

The costs are expected to rise to $34.2 billion next year, the report found.

“States can ill afford to shoulder this burden,” Stephens said. “During a time of fiscal crisis, it’s unbearable.”

A 1995 federal law sought to put an end to unfunded mandates. Its success has been eroded in recent years, the report found, through loopholes that include exemptions to the law, conditions placed on federal grants to states, and the failure of Congress to fully fund the laws its passes.

Not everyone agrees that the problem is as widespread as states claim.

The Congressional Budget Office, charged by Congress under the same 1995 Unfunded Mandate Reform Act to assess the impact of federal policy on the states, reported in July that only two laws passed in the last seven years imposed costs of more than $50 million on states. They were a 1996 increase in the minimum wage and a 1997 decrease in spending on food stamps.

The report specifically found that Bush’s No Child Left Behind law and an older special education law are voluntary programs, and aren’t technically mandates.

NCSL officials said that homeland security programs and Bush’s education law may be voluntary, but the reality is that states can’t simply walk away from them.

“It’s kind of a shell game, in a way, when they say we have a right whether to participate,” he said.