In 1969, President Nixon told the nation in his inaugural address that the country needed to transfer its wealth from war “to the urgent needs of our people at home.” That meant “decision-making must be returned to the regions and locales where the problems exist.” The elixir was combining programs into blocks and giving state and local officials far more power to decide where the money ought to go.
Nixon established an Office of Intergovernmental Relations in order to strengthen the relations among federal, state, local and tribal governments. Its job was “facilitating maximum cooperation” among the layers and making the feds “more sensitive, receptive and responsive” to the views of subnational officials.
Ronald Reagan championed his favorite urban development initiative in the State of the Union address that kicked off his second term in 1985. He, too, professed a desire to devolve power out of Washington, creating enterprise zones to concentrate decision-making at the local level. “Let us place new dreams in a million hearts and create a new generation of entrepreneurs by passing enterprise zones this year,” he said. At the end of his presidency, Congress finally passed a watered-down version of what Reagan had campaigned for.
George W. Bush’s first State of the Union address in his second term was peppered with federalism ideas, including strengthening community colleges, creating more local health-care centers, bringing better DNA identification to local law enforcement and promoting his No Child Left Behind program to improve local schools.
Through all these administrations, there was at least a modicum of White House respect for state and local governments. In fairness, Trump does want to shift power over issues including disaster response and education down to states. During his campaign, he claimed the Dobbs decision that made abortion a state issue has made most people happy. But back in power, Trump has frequently taken a combative tone toward other levels of government.
In his March address to Congress, Trump listed federal grants to states and cities he thought were egregious wastes of taxpayer dollars, such as “$59 million for illegal alien hotel rooms in New York City.” These were just some of the “scams,” he told Congress, that the locals had been perpetrating. He said federal action was stopping the flow of fentanyl and drugs because the locals weren’t doing it.
Trump promised a crime bill that increased protections for law enforcement officials, presumably because local governments had not done so. When it came to the schools, he promised to rid education of local-level “wokeness.”
All this is happening at a moment of deepening state and local partisanship. The Republicans have 23 trifectas — states in which the party holds the governorship and both houses of the legislature. Democrats, in contrast, have just 15 trifectas. Divided government once predominated — 31 states in 1992, but that changed in the post-economic-collapse elections after 2010. Republicans since then have held a decided edge over Democrats in the states. But most big cities are under solid Democratic control.
Trump has derided big cities as “sanctuary cities,” determined to undermine his campaign to deport immigrants. Democratic mayors have said that wasn’t true and accused administration officials of “lying about my city” as well as the dangers residents face, as Boston Mayor Michelle Wu put it. The mayors tried to explain that “sanctuary’’ status did not mean they were shielding migrants with criminal records, but claimed coordination between local law enforcement officials and the federal office seeking to arrest migrants, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, often was so loose that migrants were released before ICE could pick them up.
So here are the clues to the case of disappearing federalism: There is a decline of the prominence of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs. There is the shift in domestic policy away from grants and other forms of financial assistance, in pursuit of common federal-state-local goals, to a federal policy of cutting aid and cracking down on immigrants.
Most of all, it’s a retreat from relations that were more or less cooperative, based on federal respect for state and local partners, and a move to ongoing conflict, where the Trump White House has seen cities as opponents, often armed with lawsuits. With trifectas dominating most state governments, it’s a position that will be hard to change, regardless of who is in the White House.
Conservatism before the 2010s meant paring back the role of the federal government and relying more on a Tenth Amendment strategy of federalism, with a constant effort to draw a line between the federal and state-local roles. The decisions of Republican presidents didn’t always match the theory, but the idea was never far away.
Trump, in contrast, is pursuing a big-government version of conservatism, aimed at using federal power to promote his social policy goals, even if they are at the expense of powers “reserved to the states or the people,” as the Tenth Amendment puts it. State governments are either allies or roadblocks, and local governments are pushed completely to the sidelines. Either way, they aren’t players in his policy.
As a result, we’re likely looking at a period of disappearing federalism for a long time to come.
Governing’s opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing’s editors or management.
