What did the COVID-19 pandemic teach us about federalism today?

0:06At the founding, the state legislatures, that was where the action was. People thought, how can anything go wrong? These are our fellow citizens we're electing. At the time, they were there for short terms. Most of the early state governments put most of their power in the state legislatures. At that point, Congress had very little power and frequently exercised it. But what could go wrong led to the answer, well, a lot could go wrong.

0:33It turns out that state legislatures could perform either in a rational way, sometimes corrupt ways, sometimes not very far thinking ways. Already by the early 1800s, as the vote is being spread beyond white male, property owning individuals to other individuals in American society, you start recalibrating, and you decide, well, maybe the executive branches ought to have a little more authority. After that, they're building up the power of the state courts.

1:03Then, post Civil War, you have, of course, the national government playing a far more consequential role when it comes to policy generally and the protection of individual rights. The thing that emerged from that story was just realizing how critical the role of structure is in dealing with a specific problem. I think one nice way to illustrate this is to think about the pandemic, where God willing, we're towards the end of it, let's hope. But the one thing we knew for sure, when we look back on the spring of 2020, is we did not have a lot of answers about what to do with this lethal virus. It presented this great debate of, should we be nationalizing everything, or should some of the problems created by the pandemic be dealt with at the local level? To me, the answer is a classic American one. We did a little of both. In retrospect, we probably, for the most part,

2:04got that balance right. Think of the production of vaccines. It's a little bit like in World War II, building up the military. You had to centralize this, with the national government and its resources running the show. You weren't going to ask the states of Ohio and Indiana to produce a vaccine. I don't think anyone in retrospect thinks that was a mistake.

2:26In fact, so far, it looks to have been highly successful. On the other hand, there were some things that we wisely decided not to nationalize. We had these emergencies early in the spring of 2020 of the number of people going to hospitals, running out of hospital beds, and a couple of states decided to put more people from hospitals to nursing homes. There was some intuition to that.

2:52Many of these folks were elderly. Little did we know at the time, the elderly were the most vulnerable to COVID. That was on reflection, it's unfortunate that experiment even occurred, but I think we would be all say that we were grateful that that particular idea wasn't nationalized. I think I would say the same thing about the schools.

3:12It was very complicated what to do in the schools, whether it came to remote learning, hybrid learning, mask mandates. I think there's a lot to be said for the reality that different states could try different approaches. Over time, you couldn't hide the number of people getting sick, the number of people being hospitalized, and most regrettably, the number of people dying.

3:37This was an area where I think federalism shows its pluses. We, of course, would have nationalized every answer if we knew it was the right answer, but that, of course, is the problem with difficult policy issues. Where at the outset, you don't know the answer, and you don't want to conduct an experiment on 330 million people in 51 jurisdictions, when you're just not sure how it's going to come out. I think federalism, you could argue, was tested.

4:03But again, the point of federalism was, what should be national and what should be local? Federalism doesn't mean it should always be local. Federalism is a question, it's not an answer. The question during the pandemic is what parts of the government responses should be national, what parts local, and there's plenty of room for debate at different times during the pandemic, and exactly what should have been done.

4:25But I think it would be the rare individual that would say, looking back on it, that we wanted everything to be national. We wanted the answer to the pandemic always to be nationalized. At the same time, I think no one thinks we should have had everything handled locally. That wouldn't have made any sense. That is the way to put it. Federalism is a question. It's not an answer, and I think the pandemic really illustrates that.