Within weeks of the Trump administration starting the Department of Government Efficiency, about a dozen states had set up little DOGEs of their own. There’s nothing new about state lawmakers looking to ferret out waste and fraud from government programs. “We were doing DOGE before DOGE was a thing,” Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds said. Still, it was notable that Reynolds and several other Republicans were quick to adopt such labeling. It was one among a number of ideas that have spread quickly this year from Washington out to the states.
In April, Florida became the second state to ban the addition of fluoride by municipal water systems, following Utah. In effect, these states were enacting a policy approach favored by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the federal health secretary. Some are also promoting his ideas about raw milk. Red states are also lining up to support the administration’s immigration policies, requiring local law enforcement agencies to cooperate with federal authorities and pledging to build detention centers.
Maybe none of this is surprising but it does represent a change from the usual course of events. Typically, policy ideas are adopted at the state level — whether by red states or blue — and then sometimes gain enough momentum to spread to the national level.
Think about the strict welfare requirements that originated in Wisconsin before going national under President Bill Clinton. Or the effort in Massachusetts to expand health insurance coverage that formed the basis of the Affordable Care Act 15 years ago.
At the moment, we’re seeing more of a top-down form of federalism, with red states, at least, willing to try ideas handed down from Washington. President Donald Trump is talking about shifting more responsibility to states in areas including health care, education and disaster response, but red states clearly are ready to adopt policy ideas before the feds take the trouble of insisting through program cuts or mandates.
Federal officials have long looked to states, cities and counties to carry out their ideas. Often this takes on a chicken-and-egg quality, with policies being altered or amplified as they flow between levels of government. Private school choice, for example, found enormous traction in red states between the two Trump administrations, both of which promoted the idea.
The current willingness of state-level Republicans to try out pages from the Trump playbook demonstrates a couple of things. Trump’s approaches to most issues have buy-in from most Republicans around the country. Plus, we’re in an era of nationalized politics, with ideas spreading faster than ever across jurisdictional lines.
Both of those points are obvious.
Still, what we’re seeing now is something different. It’s not as if states began devising their own versions of the New Deal or Great Society as those agendas started moving in Washington in earlier times.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with states borrowing ideas from Washington before they’ve been fully vetted at the federal level. The beauty of federalism, however, is that experiments can happen within a state or a group of states before they become law everywhere. That lowers the risk. State and local leaders can let some other governor or mayor take the heat if an idea isn’t going to work out.
