A New Pandemic Federalism?
[Note to the reader: this post is appearing after a few months ‘hiatus’, by which I mean following and writing about the politics of American federalism. You can read what I’ve been working on in the interim in a few articles in Policy & Society, Social Policy & Administration, Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis, Jacobin, Notes on the Crisis, and see a talk I gave in November at the Jain Family Institute.]
Even when federalism is explained to him, the man in the street does not care much about it one way or another. Is it, therefore, anything at all?
William H. Riker (1969)
It has been one year since the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in the United States, a year defined by conflict over which level of government is responsible for responding to the millions of cases that have occurred since, conflict over who is accountable for the now more than 400,000 deaths. Does the arrival of a new presidential administration signal a new approach to pandemic federalism?
On the surface, and far below it, the answer is yes. Biden has already articulated plans for a stronger federal role in setting pandemic policy — including beefing up the vaccine supply chain and reimbursing state and local governments for personnel and supplies through FEMA — as well as more routinized interactions with state and local officials in structuring the viability of public-health planning efforts. Trump, at best, took a hands-off approach to pandemic policy, denying states billions in requested funds for vaccine distribution (as the administration’s assistant secretary for Health and Human Services, Brett Giroir, put it: “The federal government doesn’t invade Texas or Montana and provide shots to people.”)
State and local efforts to negotiate with the Trump administration also often proved futile. Governors reportedly enjoyed a far warmer reception from Vice President Mike Pence than they had from other White House staff (whom one state official referred to as “the fucking worst”), but the Vice President was often unable to broker the conflicts that invariably broke out between the President and governors. Between January and September, Pence conducted 35 briefings for governors as well as regular conference calls and one-on-one discussions. Nevertheless, without a formal arrangement, Pence lacked the authority to take action on governors’ requests for resources, telling them instead that he would “look into it.”
Beyond direct efforts to mitigate the pandemic itself, Biden’s $1.9 trillion relief proposal would include $350 billion in unrestricted aid to state and local governments, which could be used to support subnational revenues, which have flagged since the pandemic. Despite some feints in the direction of unconditional aid, Trump could never commit to what many Republicans continued to call “blue-state bailouts.” Not only was Democrats’ initial $1 trillion dollar state-local aid package dead on arrival in the Senate, so too were the bipartisan Problem Solvers’ proposal about half that size and a far smaller last-ditch effort abandoned during Senate negotiations late last year. Given this track record, Biden’s inauguration has been good cause for celebration among the “Big 7” intergovernmental organizations.
Yet despite meaningful differences in the White House’s approach to intergovernmental policy, the structure of American federalism has also exerted effects on pandemic response that are independent of political leadership, policy choices, and partisan configuration of government. The fact that other federal systems (Germany and Australia are often held up as examples) responded more swiftly and effectively to the pandemic than the United States does not, as some have argued, absolve federalism from responsibility. Instead, it should clue us in to meaningful differences in how federal regimes are structured.
As I have argued elsewhere, the absence of a formal structure for intergovernmental policy concertation hobbled emergency response in the United States, and cannot simply be attributed to the policy choices of the Trump administration. Since the demise of the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (ACIR) in 1996, federal officials have treated national associations of state and local governments less as partners in governing than an industrial sector like any other, and one with less lobbying power. For their part, national associations of state and local officials did make a vigorous push for federal relief in the weeks following the emergency declaration. Yet collective action proved difficult, and state and local interests lacked institutional priority within the federal government.
By contrast, intergovernmental coordination in other federations proved more routine. In Australia, the Council of Australian Governments––an intergovernmental forum founded in the early 1990s and made up of state and territorial officials––co-constituted the Prime Minister’s National Cabinet which met weekly to coordinate pandemic policy and territorial health officials in the driver’s seat. In Germany, multilateral coordination between Länder and the federal government takes place weekly under the Infektionsschutzgesetz. This coordination has improved pandemic fiscal policy. Early in the pandemic, the federal government and Länder agreed to cover all municipal business-tax losses, while the federal government agreed to pick up a permanently higher share of municipal welfare costs, and suspend municipal balanced budget rules.
Highlighting the structural variations in federal systems does not minimize the importance of leadership, however. Rather, it points to the kinds of structural reforms the Biden administration might promote to ensure greater coherence in crisis management, for COVID-19 and beyond. The single greatest tragedy in the US response is that only weeks after imposing stay-at-home orders that effectively controlled the spread of the virus, state and local governments quickly reversed course. The average state implemented initial orders for only 45 days. With little ability to influence federal fiscal policy, and dire revenue forecasts looming, state and local governments reopened, which helped to catalyze a second wave. As deaths mounted, the economic re-start meant that revenue forecasts improved.
With alternative institutions, these grim realities may have been more easily avoided. Even with Trump’s mismanagement of the crisis, a peak forum for intergovernmental coordination could have played an independent agenda-setting role at the outset of the pandemic. Even with partisan differences over governing the virus, a program of automatic stabilizer payments could have limited state and local governments’ incentives to reopen too much, too soon.
A formal body for intergovernmental coordination and a system of automatic fiscal stabilizers would not only mark a break with the fragmented federal system of the past, they are entirely politically feasible under a Biden administration. Proposals for re-constituting an ACIR-style body already attracted bipartisan congressional interest during 2018 hearings of the Speaker’s Task Force on Intergovernmental Affairs. And while congressional Republicans proved allergic to unconditional state-local aid, to say nothing of automatic stabilizers, they were hardly averse to intergovernmental spending. As the dotted line in the graph below shows, pandemic relief has already constituted an unprecedented increase in grants-in-aid to state and local governments. Automatic stabilizer payments, triggered by economic shocks, would simply be an updated version of the now-defunct General Revenue Sharing program, the high watermark of congressional concern for American federalism.
American federalism is not alone responsible for the botched pandemic response. But failing to see how its peculiar structural features have shaped important outcomes here is to miss a profound opportunity for leadership. The Biden administration could begin to seize the day by reconstituting the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs from a presidential PR shop (“You’re [at WHOIA] as an advocate for the president’s positions,” a former staffer notes) into a meaningful venue for intergovernmental brokerage, and a vehicle for lasting structural and economic reforms. Rather than simply shepherding American federalism to its next crisis, Biden could take this moment to strengthen intergovernmental relationships for years to come.
