By Donald F. Kettl, Professor Emeritus and Former Dean, University of Maryland School of Public Policy.

I can say two things with certainty about the course of post-election federal-state-local relations, in 2025 and beyond. One is that they will be more at the center of domestic policy than they have been in some time. The other is that anyone who says they are certain about how the balance will work out is not to be trusted.

For clarity’s sake, let me note that federalism isn’t what it sounds like. Many may think that it means that the federal government tries to gather all the power into its own hands, when in fact it describes a system in which a varying amount of authority goes to the states.

Many past elections have seen big debates about federalism. A little history:

• Nixon and Reagan both pledged to return power to the states.

• As former governors, Carter and Clinton campaigned as outsiders to restore state governments, in particular, to a role that many Americans thought had been lost.

• After the September 11 terrorist attacks, George W. Bush pulled power to Washington without giving federalism much thought.

• Obama wasn’t concerned about giving power to the states as a matter of principle, though he relied heavily on them to support expanding health insurance. He knew he needed the states as instruments of his ambitious plan.

• Trump had big ambitions as well, to slash the size and power of the federal bureaucracy and to cut back on environmental programs but didn’t trust Congress to pass them, so he aggressively used every tool of the presidency to advance his plans.

  
  

   

So, we’ve seen a gradual retreat from federalism-as-principle in national campaigns. Indeed, Reagan might well be the last president to operate with a truly robust idea of federal-state-local relations to drive his policies. Because he saw government itself as the core of many of the country’s biggest problems, his approach to federalism lay in trying to unwind government as much as possible, with a transfer of responsibility to the states of many functions.

In fact, in 1981, the states passed up the best deal they had ever been offered by a president: if the states took on responsibility for welfare (food stamps and AFDC), the federal government would assume the cost of Medicaid. The governors responded with a “we’re not falling for that!” response, and Reagan’s proposal died. Since then, Medicaid has been the fastest growing item in state spending, and it now represents the single largest item in state budgets.  

This sets up a fascinating—and, frankly, a bit peculiar—debate about federal-state-local relations for 2025 and beyond. That’s especially true because it’s not a two-way debate, Republicans versus Democrats, but a three-way tug, Trump versus the right-wing MAGA proponents versus the Democrats.

The Democrats might be the easiest to forecast. If Biden wins, it’s easy to predict more cash flowing to the states for infrastructure, with federal cash parceled out and with state government responsibility to make it work. But, at the core, we’re likely to see a two-track policy: a federal government that rides shotgun for states like California that seek to aggressively advance goals like air quality and for individuals who seek to travel to pro-abortion states to get procedures.

What this really means, of course, is a “see-no-evil” federalism, in which the states are relative bit players in Biden’s larger game.

The Republicans are harder to handicap. The right-wing MAGA groups, represented by many conservative activists in the states, want to consolidate their wins in areas like abortion bans and school choice, federalize those policies, and impose them on everyone else. There’s a big paradox here. The Supreme Court decided the nearly fifty-year battle against Roe by declaring there was no federal right to privacy that covered abortion and that, therefore, policymaking was up to the states. Having won that battle, anti-abortion states would like nothing better than to flip Roe on its head by transforming a national right to abortion to a national prohibition against it. The same goes for the rest of the right-wing MAGA agenda.

Donald Trump sees the short-term political danger in this strategy. The anti-abortion forces to date haven’t won a single statewide referendum. Sixty-three percent of Americans think that abortion should be legal in all or almost all cases. Among women, that position has a two-to-one edge. The margin is even greater in places like the Philadelphia metro area, where Trump has to do well if he’s going to take back the presidency.

So, if Trump skates too close to the right-wing-MAGA position, he risks losing the support of the swing voters he needs. If he works too hard to curry the swing voters favor, he risks losing the enthusiasm (and money) of the right-wing MAGA crowd. He can, of course, play to the middle and then move to the right after inauguration day.

But, no matter what, the basic principles of federalism, especially those developed by (take your pick) Lyndon B. Johnson and Ronald Reagan, are in the ditch by the side of the road, spun off by the short-term tactical needs of each candidate. With congressional majorities likely to hang by a thread, regardless of who controls each house, that’s likely to push more policymaking back into the executive branch, with the winner looking for leverage wherever he can find it.

And the value that grand debates about a “new federalism” once had will be swept into dusty presidential libraries, worthy of academic research but unlikely to fuel much policy.

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