Can Federalising Central Governments Fix…Federalism?

In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. (italics added) 

The implicit warning in these words from the Federalist Papers, written by James Madison in February 1788, has gone spectacularly unheeded.

The US, Australia, and the EU each started out as federalist ideas with extremely independent constituent states, and with constitutions that made the rise of a large central government illegal and impossible. Yet, in all three places, the federalist project has failed, and a giant central bureaucracy has arisen that is strangling the life out of both states and country, as we have opined previously.

How did this hostile takeover happen, and how do we create a new federalism that is resistant to becoming a monster all over again?

Case Study 1: The Failure of US Federalism

The US started out with a radically federalist Constitution and practical framework. Independent states were responsible for almost everything, and the central government’s role was primarily to wage war as needed against foreigners and handle things like trade standards.

One big change came with WWI, when the fashionable interpretation of the Constitution changed from Madisonian to Wilsonian, replacing Madison’s suspicion of, and exhortation against, centralised power with Wilson’s belief in the benefits of concentrating power in the central government. The result of this doctrinal shift led to the establishment by Woodrow Wilson of an administrative state in which the power of the central executive expanded tremendously, and with it the share of economic resources siphoned off by Washington’s governing and administrative apparatus. 

The percent of GDP spent by the federal government grew from 2% around 1900 to 25% today, with peaks during wars, bailouts, and lockdowns. After each peak caused by some crisis, the size of the bureaucracy (or at least the amount that the bureaucracy spent) shrank a bit, but remained higher than before the crisis. 

As a particularly egregious example of this federal government expansion, the defence industry has become obscenely large. The US Defense Department’s budget is $842 billion in 2024, on top of which the White House has requested a supplementary $50 billion to help Ukraine delay its defeat at the hands of Russia while sacrificing more Ukrainian lives, support Israel in its war against Hamas, and pursue other activities that funnel money to domestic military-related industries. 

The US spends more than the next 10 countries combined on defence, more than twice as much as China, and seven times more than Russia, even accounting for Russia’s present military budget blowout due to beating up on America’s prize anti-Russian client state. The US health system, largely ineffective and parasitical as we argued in a previous post in October 2023, is another shining example of a bloated central structure tethered to bloated private structures.

How did this runaway bloat come about? In short, mission creep and corruption. 

Big companies wanted more regulation to help make life harder for entrants to their industries. The legal and prison-stewardship professions wanted and found more customers (prisoners). The health industry wanted and found more customers (sick people). The defence industry wanted and found more foreign enemies. Hence each of these groups in various ways goaded and nudged the federal government to aid the expansion of their private interests.

Along the way, as government became more centralised and powerful, it also created new agencies to regulate organisations, like financial institutions, polluters, and telecommunications firms. The big firms in those industries, like those in the defence and health industries before them, eventually captured their regulators, turning them against competitors by regulating smaller firms out of existence and against consumers by reducing competition overall. The increased power of the centre to appropriate and control resources was used to create a Leviathan of bureaucracy that proved to be fertile ground for training a parasitical globalist Western elite that talks down to those it preys on, as we see with the ESG and DEI crazes. 

Did individual states resist? Most certainly, and judging from the recent actions of some Florida government officials, they still are resisting. Yet on the long march of central expansion, the states were overpowered because the federal government was able to access far greater resources by increasing existing national taxes and creating new ones. A steady stream of excuses for expansion were available because companies and individuals exploited loopholes in existing regulations, and because there were real and imagined emergencies that could be readily harnessed to the expansionary wagon. The US, once the pinnacle of federalism, now has an outright fascist political centre: a unification of judicial, commercial, legislative, executive, and religious power.

Case Study 2: The Descent of Australia

Australia started as a federation in 1901, loosely modelled on the German federation, but with a generous helping of innovative elements designed to keep the centre from getting too much power. Six self-governing colonies preceded federation, and only in the latter part of the 19^th century did support grow for a unified nation. Even then, the idea was that the central authority would handle a very limited number of activities where inefficiency had become manifest (mainly defence, trade, and immigration). The centre, known formally as the ‘Commonwealth,’ was given no powers outside of emergencies. States were supposed to organise everything, including education and health. 

Australia even introduced in 1918 a compulsory preferential voting system, in which voters indicate not just their top choice of candidate but their second-preferred, third-preferred, fourth-preferred, and so on. This system makes it easier than in a simple first-past-the-post system for new parties to emerge before the eyes of the voting public, since if voters can mark their ballot for only one party, they will be more reluctant to plump for outsiders for fear of wasting their votes. 

If asked for a ranking of preferences though, they can select a fringe party candidate at the top while still giving major parties nods, in order of preference, down the whole slate of candidates. Should a voter’s most-preferred party get dumped out once first preferences are counted, her (and other voters’) subsidiary preferences will continue to be counted until one candidate has more than 50% of the vote. In this way, a new party has far more chance to emerge and quickly grow. A further bulwark against centralised power was put in place for taxation: a standing committee oversaw the division of federal tax funds amongst the states.

So how did that all work out? As in the US, today the Australian defence budget is booming, blowing past A$50 billion for the first time this year. The Commonwealth has insinuated itself via regulation into welfare, health, and education, and now dominates tax collection. It spends around 27% of GDP all told, up from practically zero before the first World War and around 10% in 1960.

Individual states still have significant power, which they (ab)used ruthlessly during lockdowns, but both state and central governments have become lobby-infested, nonsense-promoting Leviathans. A particular problem is that everywhere — and this is despite the preferential voting system that was supposed to help dilute power — the same two political parties run the show, both kept afloat whenever necessary by means of coalitions with wingman parties (the Labour party has the Greens, and the Liberal party has the Nationals). 

The two dominant Australian parties have found that with this setup they can keep minor parties out of the picture by gerrymandering. In a particularly egregious instance, a committee largely made up of members of these parties divided the constituency of a rebel politician named Rob Pyne such that he no longer even lived in the constituency that voted him into the Queensland Parliament. Via gerrymandering and other means, Australia’s political class maintains two dominant Mafiosi groups spreading corruption and bad habits, all with the support of major international corporations. Read our 2022 book Rigged to learn more about the gruesome ‘games of mates’ played out Down Under.

Case Study 3: How the European Union Gobbled Up Member States’ Authority

The foundations of the EU started small, when under the Schuman plan in 1951 six countries agreed to integrate their coal and steel industries under one management. Closer economic integration in the following years led to the formation of the European Economic Community (or EEC, subsequently simplified to EC) in 1957 and ultimately the European Union (EU) in 1993. The EU is currently a 28-country federation. 

Initially, the structure of the EC was almost the pinnacle of federalism: there was no actual central government (since after all, independent states were sovereign nations!) and EC leadership rotated around countries every six months. EC meetings involved national leaders, and ministers were directed toward collaborative economic matters such as financing the Common Agricultural Policy. The self-interest of member countries trumped supranational dreaming. There was a so-called parliament, but with only 78 members and no legislative authority. The parliamentarians were not elected directly, but rather drawn from the elected representatives of member countries’ parliaments.

Yet right as rain, the number of institutions, agencies, and bureaucrats blossomed over time as mission creep set in. At first, most of the growing cadre of bureaucrats passed their days pleasantly working on things like standards for the thickness of water mains and train gauges. Over time, the Community organised things such that it would take on increasingly authoritative roles in affairs that extended beyond its original remit, such as foreign policy and monetary policy, the latter formalised with the establishment of the European Central Bank in Frankfurt in 1998.

Today, the EU has become a fire-breathing monster. Via health regulations, nonsensical industry standards such as making ESG reporting compulsory for major companies, a central currency it has used to gain control of taxation and debt, educational standards, and so on, the EU is an executive and legislative body wielding powers it was never supposed to have. Its formal budget is not so large, but the budget it directs is huge.

Under a multi-year agreement between the member states, it has a budget of 1.8 trillion Euros to spend in the period 2021-27 (1% to 2% of GDP). This is for central EU administration and programs, so somewhat equivalent to what Washington spends on itself. It does not include its hold over individual member countries’ government spending, which amounts to about 50% of EU GDP. The EU bureaucracy controls much of that spending via mandated health expenses (including hidden contracts with Pfizer), mandated propaganda, mandated reporting rules, and so on. 

Instructively, the EU attained many of its current powers not via democratic vote, but rather via reorganisation: it accumulated power by lifting burdens from individual leaders of member countries who couldn’t be bothered with cumbersome democratic routes. The European Commission took the lead in things like Brexit, migration, and the Covid vaccines, along the way usurping erstwhile national powers over foreign diplomacy and health budgets. Member states’ governments let it happen. 

The EU propaganda machinery similarly started small as a set of directives for media and Big Tech to follow, but has morphed into a full-fledged and blatant ministry of propaganda that outlaws dissent from officialdom. Yet again fascism by stealth, once more cheered on by the large international corporations and globalist elites. Individual European countries still have a lot of power – more so than do the states in the US and Australia, because at least Europe’s armies are still national – but the descent towards centralised and tyrannical bloat in Europe has been staggering.

How to Fix Federalism?

The last few decades have demonstrated that in disparate regions, with disparate starting points, small central bureaucracies found alliances with large corporations and wealthy individuals, usurped more and more power, and sucked the life out of the federations they were supposed to serve. All kinds of institutional checks and balances failed, from audit offices to veto powers to rotating leaderships. The beast just kept growing regardless, through arrogance, cunning, stealth and corruption.

Federalism is under attack, but there is life in the old nag yet. In all three of the examples above, the constituent states still have a somewhat functioning democracy, a blossoming independent media, and a growing awareness on the part of the citizenry that they are dealing with something that is actively working against their interests. Except within those at the centre itself, there is a desire for more decision-making to occur non-centrally. 

Populations are voting with their feet for places that get it right (like Florida, Switzerland, Madrid, and Poland (pre-2024)) and running away from places that get it wrong (like London, California, and Melbourne). The central Leviathans are still increasing their control, but they must now shout more shrilly to get their way, and pretend that every small problem is an existential threat requiring more control. A (monkey)pox upon their houses!

We think the future is federalist, and we want to look ahead and consider how to stop the current problem from re-emerging. How can a brand of federalism be built that serves as a robust bulwark against the fascist forces that are so dominant today?

The main dilemma we see is that any modern federation probably cannot avoid having a modestly sized ‘shared’ bureaucracy. Many on the side of Team Sanity during the Covid years dream of having very little common bureaucracy, but as much as we hate it, we think that a shared bureaucracy is not only inevitable but can even serve a purpose.

We need a reasonably sized bureaucracy to run a large army because every modern Western state has enemies with large armies. We also need one to provide a countervailing force to big international corporations that will run roughshod over all of us if there is no organised resistance. As dreamy as it seems, 18^th century liberalism is just too individualistic and naïve, in our view, about the modern realities of the dog-eat-dog world of power. Large companies and countries with bad intentions make fearsome beasts that force us to have our own fierce beast to defend ourselves. 

Yet how to have our own fierce beast and not be eaten by it too?

One obvious place to start is to dismantle the current anti-social bureaucracy and establish a process of justice to expose and punish the crimes of central government. That is all good, and welcome, but we also have to think ahead to the day after the punishments. How are we going to set things up then, for our children and their children? 

An important element to couple with future federalism is a far more active and aware citizenry. We have already sketched two crucial innovations that would help to create that: the appointment of every bureaucratic leader with budget or regulatory authority by citizen juries, accompanied by a citizen media duty in recognition of news as an important public good that must be provided by the citizenry itself. Those two innovations should help generate a self-informing citizenry that is regularly involved in choosing leaders and safeguarding against bureaucratic abuse.

Can the ‘Fourth Power’ Fight Corruption Alone?

The heart of those two proposals was the establishment within central government and each sub-component of the federation (e.g., state or country) of a ‘fourth power’ whose job is to keep the citizenry self-informed and to force the other three powers of government (legislative, executive, and judicial) to work for their populations instead of ganging up on them.

 Citizen-jury-based appointments organised by this fourth power would replace political appointments to the top of any institution dependent on government money, and of any institution that takes on a role similar to that of government – including charities, many of which presently have features used by the rich to evade democratic forces (think of the Gates Foundation). The fourth power’s media arm might also extend to supplying information to the public from within government itself, such as about the workings and discoveries of audit offices. US initiatives in this direction are well underway.

Yet, even if the top bureaucrats in a new federal system were to be independently appointed by citizen juries, commercial pressures to corrupt those appointees would be immediate and formidable: powerful national and international corporations are inherently greedy and won’t be going anywhere. These corporations will also ally with top consultants whose lifeblood flows from assisting them in subverting the interests of their own populations.

With all the targets close together in a physical location like Washington, D.C., Canberra, or Brussels, Big Money can easily encircle top bureaucrats with temptations and with their own propagandist media apparatus, encouraging them to see the rest of us as sub-human and needing to be told what to do every minute of the day, just like what happens now. Business and political elites can be counted upon to sabotage the fourth power’s anti-corruption efforts in situ. 

The systems built by the fourth power to gain citizen oversight on what is happening at the centre would be gradually cloned by shadow bureaucracies, set up by Big Money, that directly advise and ‘help’ top politicians ‘efficiently’ with this or that problem. The centre would start to circumvent citizen-backed structures and propagandise against citizen jury-chosen leaders, with the emerging parasitical class making truly independent leaders out to be failures.

Through these and many other nefarious mechanisms we expect Big Money to discover how to subdue and corrupt the fourth power. A parasitical class would re-emerge and flourish, assisted crucially by the co-location of many key roles. This dystopian thought experiment leads us to conclude that a directly democratic fourth power can’t do it all alone: to maintain the separation of government powers there needs to be physical separation of government powers as well. The central bureaucracy needs to hit the road.

The Traveling Bureaucracy

Imagine a system where instead of permanent co-location in a particular geographical seat, every functional area of a central bureaucracy was positioned somewhere different within the federation, and moreover, uprooted and re-homed elsewhere every couple of decades, on a schedule staggered with the periodic re-homings of the other functional areas.

Each functional area would be placed inside the bureaucracy of a randomly-chosen member of the next lowest level of government — i.e., the state level in the US and Australia, the provincial level in Canada, or the country level in the EU — and then rotated into another randomly selected member’s bureaucracy after a designated time period.

So, for example, the US Department of State might be part of the governing apparatus of Florida for a period of 20 years, after which it would be sent to Texas or Montana. Similarly, the US Federal Reserve might be part of the Federal Reserve of Ohio for 20 years, and then moved to Missouri. The federal government would still set the policy, scope of responsibilities and budgets for these entities, but the day-to-day running of their activities and all personnel matters would be decided locally, with a director at the helm appointed by a citizen jury formed from the citizens of that local member state.

How would this work in the EU, with 28 countries? The central EU bureaucracy would be organised into, let us say, approximately 24 functional areas of roughly equal size. Those 24 functional areas would rotate around the EU, with one or two functions relocating to another country every year, and no two areas ever co-located in the same member country. The head of each functional area, such as the top civil servant in education, would be appointed by a local citizen jury and therefore tethered to the local population.

Something like two years before the scheduled uprooting and relocation, the new host country would be randomly chosen and would gear up to make space for the incoming central function. Because the new host would have power over all personnel matters, it would have the option during the transitional period to plan any reduction or reallocation of people within the incoming bureaucracy.

Detailed Design Specifications: Rotations, Pruning, Modularity, and Funding Controls

The purpose of having fewer functional areas than federation members is to create a strong political incentive to keep the rotation going: the members without such a responsibility in one year will demand that one come to them, making it difficult to stop the rotation. The purpose of the rotation itself is to embed an automatic moment of creative destruction and renewal in each area: a point when what is still truly efficient and useful will be assessed by the fresh, critical eyes of a new host willing and able to jettison what no longer makes sense. 

By maintaining the same central functionality for the entire federation yet with fewer resources, the local host would be able to spend some of the surplus on its own citizens, via more job positions in other areas within its local bureaucracy more directly concerned with local matters.

Both functional units and the civil servants staffing them would need to look useful to the new host, for instance via a demonstrated track record, if they want their area and their jobs to survive the rotation. An automatic pruning moment like this is missing in the current system, where the incentives for the central bureaucracy are to grow and grow, leaving dead wood to gum up the works. Creative destruction is recognised as a crucial component ensuring continued vitality in the private sector. Although it brings short-term pain and inefficiency, we need regular shake-ups in the public sector as well if we are to avoid a re-emergence of the worse long-term problems seen today.

Keeping the bureaucracy somewhat modular, and thereby limiting the integration between functional units, is likewise a feature, not a bug. Modular units are easier to optimise and easier to keep honest. Coordination between units would be more difficult with a modular design, but those coordination problems would then be solved via explicit recognition of shared problems. 

Open debate and open initiatives would replace the Gordian Knot enmeshments we have at the moment that make corruption so hard to identify and undo. Federalisation of the central system itself, by splitting up and rotating functional areas around member-state locations, forces the solutions to coordination problems at the central level to be deliberated upon in the open. It would force both the public service and the citizenry to be more mature about the true difficulties of bureaucracy, rewarding those who bring fewer catchy slogans and more pragmatism and tolerance. It would promote the value of internal generalists over media people.

This system would also need a built-in mechanism to prevent the central government from gaining direct control over resources outside of the scattered central bureaucracy – for example over charities’ war chests or university research groups’ funding. Our proposal is that all functional areas are empowered to demand control over any extra-governmental funds that central politicians manage to usurp and direct, even if that usurpation is achieved via private organisations set up by donors. 

To operationalise this would require an administrative court that would adjudicate which of the functional areas gets the identified funds. We hope this ability to pounce on extra-governmental money would create a very strong incentive for the many functional areas to keep tabs on the resources controlled directly or indirectly by the central politicians. To work, it would be important to permit no exceptions to the rule that there can be no secret or special funds, particularly not for reasons of ‘national security’ or ‘emergencies,’ for otherwise all corruption would be channelled via such excuses, as happened with Covid.

Our design specifications exclude the need for a large capital city: no physical place would exist in which the major ministries all have their head offices, assembling power and lobbyists. Still, parliaments and executive central government offices full of elected politicians and able to host visiting overseas diplomats could exist in one or perhaps two places. But the show of central authority in Washington, D.C. and her analogous cities all over the West would morph into something far more modest than it is now. All back-office support and tools embedded in the various departments of the deep state would be located elsewhere. Imagine what you could do with that real estate on Independence Avenue.

Even the security and coffee machines surrounding the offices of executive government would be organised and decided upon by one of the ministries, located in one of the member states far away from the central parliamentary seat, with strong incentives to keep it efficient and small. Central politicians would still have great power, namely over the budget and the laws pertaining to all the federation’s citizens, simply because the population needs to have such things decided upon by representatives. However, the citizenry and the member states would have far more direct control over all the tools those politicians would have at their disposal.

Could the Locals Go Rogue?

One might worry that in such a system, local politicians and bureaucrats would raid and misdirect the resources that the centre sends to them to spend. We think this risk is lower than it might seem, for the following reasons.

In our rotational system, each member state would be administering the central expenses of the whole federation in regard to one area only, such as education, while other individual member states would administer other important central areas pertaining to the whole, like defence, health, food safety standards, taxation, and national parks. 

As long as it makes sense to be in federation together with the other member states, there is an economic and political incentive for each state to be reasonable in its discharge of funds. Besides, the budget would still be subject to central control and thus indirectly to the oversight of the population as a whole. If one member state misbehaves, the population as a whole can react, via changes in budgets.

Another worry is that civil servants working for a central area, but physically positioned in one particular member state and working directly under citizens loyal to that state, would themselves have divided loyalties. The money and the purpose of their work is to serve the whole, while the incentives of their top boss and the ethos in their physical location are to serve the local state. We again see this as a feature, not a bug, as it is precisely this tension that would make it difficult for a new central Leviathan to emerge. 

To work well, the entire system both needs and generates trust between the constituent states, a trust born of and maintained by joint interests. Over time, the rotation and mutual dependence embedded in this system should foster a culture of efficient cooperation. It would function a bit like a community of families, with each family, in rotation, taking up particular tasks beneficial to the whole.

Of course some difficulties would arise, including instances of local heads abusing their power, but those heads are ultimately responsible to their local populations who have an incentive to keep good relations going with the citizens of the whole federation. Only if local populations no longer see the point of being part of the whole would this fall apart, and rightly so: yet another feature, not a bug. This tension keeps the system on its toes, forcing a practise of cooperation amongst the member states and a continuous searching for common interests. 

If there is truly no longer a joint interest in remaining a federation, then the federation would and should fall apart in a grand example of creative destruction, to make way for a more suitable supra-state organisational structure to emerge. Breaking up would nonetheless be painful, because suddenly each state wishing to break up would have to do everything the other states were doing for them, incurring a high immediate cost. Another feature, and one with another analogy to families.

Towards a New Federalism for the Digital Age

Our new federalism proposal is uniquely suited to the modern era. In previous centuries, before the internet and instant, high-quality, long-distance video communication, it would have been impossible to federalise the central bureaucracy in this manner. Information-sharing, discussion, problem-solving and coordination amongst the central bureaucratic units and between them and the central politicians would have been all but impossible. 

It would have taken weeks for a politician or public servant to do one tour of all the functional areas in all the member states. The massive amount of coordination required to run a large bureaucracy would have prevented the abandonment of co-location. The opportunity we sketch to polycentrify the highest level of government is made possible because of new technology through which coordination across many deeply linked units located in different places has become much easier, and even commonplace.

Control by politicians and corporations over information flows, made possible on an extreme scale by modern communications technology and the monolithic media companies it engenders, is also something directly addressed in our proposal. After a period of adjustment to the direct democratic requirements of the new system, frequent citizen involvement in the running of media, member states, and the federation would come to be seen as normal, which over time would create a more active and informed citizenry. Citizens would be mobilised to stand up for their own interests to a far greater degree and more efficiently than they are at present.

As much as our proposal represents change, some aspects of what happens today would continue. The division of responsibilities between the central government and the governments of individual member states would still be subject to ‘normal politics.’ Both would tug perennially for more resources under their control, competing with each other and with citizens. The factors pushing against those expansionary drives would be much more potent than they are now though, via the activities of the fourth power and via the architecture and logistics of the polycentric system. 

Fine-tuning and adapting this system of polycentric federalism needs its own structures, which requires careful analysis of existing polycentric systems, such as in Switzerland, which has kept its federalism largely intact. Some outstanding design questions include the following:

1. Should the size of the central functional area taken on by a given member state roughly correspond to that state’s own size, if only because very small states might lack the administrative capacity to take on very large chunks of the bureaucracy? This could be accomplished via size-based stratification of the randomised allocation mechanism. (Downsides: the US Department of Defense would probably never be seated in Idaho. Upsides: the competition between a member state’s local bureaucracy and that of the central area it is hosting in any given year would be more equal.)
2. Should the heads of each central functional area be allowed to travel to the central parliamentary seat? (Downsides: they would then more easily be able to collude with elected politicians and Big Money against the interests of the people. Upsides: joint activities between the politicians and the central bureaucracy would be more efficient.) 

Are you a political pragmatist truly interested in turning the Titanic of modern Western parasitical power structures, and helping design a more robust, streamlined, and responsive version of federalism to take their place in the future? If so, we would like you to engage with your own ideas, organise conferences on this issue, and trial things locally. When our societies are truly ready for reform, the restoration movement cannot afford to be holding a folder empty of blueprints. The moment for serious design thinking is now.