Federalism: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Federalism: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Clyde Wilcox, Georgetown University
American federalism is a complex system of contested relationships between national, state, and local government across myriad policy areas. It is dynamic and continues to be an important principle that plays itself out in American politics. For example, with the recent Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), the abortion issue has been returned to state governments to decide, and the Trump Administration threatens to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education, which supplies around 8 percent of school spending in the United States, but substantially more in poor areas.
Federalism has a number of advantages. Most large democracies are in some way federal, although the level of centralization across issues differs dramatically. Federalism allows for large countries, such as the United States, to deal with local conditions. Whereas a national air pollution standard might be fine for rural states like Utah and Wyoming, it may fall woefully short in places like California, home to Los Angeles, and Texas, home to Houston. California and Texas can adopt stricter standards, and they may allow their cities to adopt even greener policies. Not all take advantage of this opportunity, but many do.
Similarly, it is difficult to craft a central education policy for rural Alaska, where families with children are scattered across impossibly large distances and the challenge is to get education to remote households, and Fairfax, Virginia, where 25 different languages may be represented in a single first grade class. But a federal system in which the national government provides resources and coordinates the exchange of best practices can help state and local governments best educate their students.
Federalism also allows for experimentation. States like California often adopt stricter environmental standards, and industries complain loudly that they cannot possibly adapt to the new environmental regulations. Yet routinely they do adapt, and when they do, other states can copy or adopt a modified version of the standards. States are innovating constantly across dozens of policy areas, including how to encourage job creation, how to better teach geography, how to help poor families thrive, and how to help the unemployed to enter the workplace. The national government frequently creates programs that provide funding for particular solutions to these problems and occasionally allows states flexibility to use the money to try different approaches for their unique situations.
An example of this experimentation has been state legalization of possession and sale of marijuana. Although the sale of marijuana remains a federal crime, states first experimented with creating dispensaries for medical marijuana for conditions such as PTSD and glaucoma. Over time the list of medical conditions that allowed for a prescription grew. But in 2012 Washington State and Oregon legalized marijuana for recreational use. Policymakers in a number of states watched closely to see whether this would lead to problems that affected civil society or crime, as well as how much increased state revenue the taxes on the product would produce. Today, 24 states have legalized the recreational use of marijuana, but they regulate the sale very differently.
Federalism also allows the United States to deal with its great cultural and religious differences. When certain types of activities are regulated by state governments, contentious national fights are somewhat mitigated. Issues like the death penalty, prostitution, teaching of sex education, sale of alcohol, and marriage and divorce are mainly handled by the states. This allows states to meet their residents’ needs. For example, many states offer a “covenant marriage” that is harder to get into and harder to get out of, while Las Vegas has a drive through church where you can get married without leaving your car. It also means that states can grant greater civil liberties to citizens of the state than those accrued through the U.S. Constitution, including equality and privacy.
While federalism has many advantages, the great disadvantage of federalism is its inequality. Although many federal programs provide more money to poor states than to rich states, this does not help to alleviate the differences across states in the quality of schools, public libraries, and even roads. Some things are crimes in some states and not others, and the penalties for these crimes vary greatly.
The ugly side of federalism comes when some states seek to explicitly limit the rights of some of their citizens. The greater flexibility of federalism has meant that in the first decades of the twenty-first century, some gay and lesbian couples could marry, while others were barred from any of the legal benefits of marriage by special state constitutional amendments. Americans will continue to grapple with the issues related to balancing federal and state powers.
