The Cool Basement Under the Hot House
Passions sweep through Washington, but local governments evoke trust and confidence
The political furnace in Washington, D.C. is blazing with executive orders, dismissal notices, lawsuit filings, threatened impeachments, and a controversial congressional reconciliation bill. Fortunately, the lowest tier of the country’s federal system retards the flame and pours water on the timber.
Image: commons.wikimedia.org by Richard Croft
Nationally, the engine of government seems simultaneously in overdrive and braked to a halt. Endless executive orders are immediately declared unconstitutional, a narrowly divided Congress struggles to act, and bureaucracies say they lack the personnel to respond to citizen requests. But local governments soldier on, picking up the garbage, extinguishing fires, cleaning streets, teaching children, and directing traffic.
Eighty-five percent of public employees work for state and local governments. Over 14 million are hired locally, 5 million by state governments, and less than 3 million by the government located in Washington, D.C. The federal government has traditionally paid for about a quarter of the cost of the services provided by state and local governments. That jumped to a third during the response to the Covid pandemic at the end of the Donald Trump Administration and throughout Joe Biden’s term in office. Congress promises to restore the federal role to its former level in the reconciliation bill.
Keeping government operations funded locally appears to be what the public wants. In a recently released volume published by the Hoover Institution, Morris Fiorina and Alice Yang tell us that nearly three-fourths of both Republicans and Democrats say they have “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of “trust and confidence” in the local government in the area where they live “when it comes to handling local problems,” a percentage that has hardly changed over the past quarter of a century.
That is pretty cool.
Digging deeper into the Gallup data, Fiorina and Yang show that Republicans have as much “trust and confidence” in state as in local governments, but, for Democrats, the percentage, as high in 2002 as it was among Republicans, has since slipped to around 55 percent. Still, majorities of both parties still express positive sentiments toward their state governments.
Not so, when the authors take a look at Gallup’s information about the national hothouse. Republican “trust and confidence” in the national government when “it comes to handling domestic problems” fluctuates from a high of 80 percent in 2004 to a low of 25 percent during the Obama Administration to a high of nearly 75 percent during Trump’s first term in office, to under 20 percent when Biden assumed the presidency. Democratic assessments are nearly the mirror image of these expressed by Republicans. They go from a low of 40 percent during George W. Bush’s presidential term to a high of 75 percent during the Obama years, to a low of 25 percent when Trump first assumes office and back up to the high sixties under Biden.
Amid all the fluctuation, the most telling trendline is the one observed for “independents,” who identify with neither political party. As these less politically passionate citizens watch partisan evaluations bounce up and down with each and every change in administration, their confidence in the federal government slides steadily—from over 50 percent at the beginning of the 21st Century to 30 percent in 2023, the last available measurement.
Survey results underline just how much a federal system contributes to the peace of the realm. The nation is deeply divided between the two political parties; separated into red and blue states, with just a few purplish ones in between; split between big cities, inner suburbs, ex-urbs, small towns, and rural areas like a coat of many colors. But the federal system, by putting local governments in charge, squelches much of the conflict. Each jurisdiction chooses leaders with which its voters are comfortable. Overall, the system generates a pattern of trust and confidence in local institutions. At the national level, competing political parties push their power to the limit, each hoping to grab all the levers of power. The public’s response to the over-heated national scene turns sour. As the intensity of the national divide accelerates, trust and confidence in local institutions become increasingly critical for the well-being of the federal system as a whole.
All is not perfect at the state and local government, of course. Schools mishandled their response to the Covid pandemic, homelessness abounds in too many cities, police use excessive force on too many occasions, and fire departments are sometimes ill-prepared for destructive forest fires. But Gallup’s survey tells us something important. The public has repeatedly said, over more than two decades, that the local tier of government is worthy of its trust and confidence. In the age of the hothouse, it is good, even necessary, to have a cool basement.
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Paul E. Peterson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University and a professor of government at Harvard University.