Saving Congress from Itself: Emancipating the States & Empowering Their People.

AuthorPilon, Roger
PositionBook review

Saving Congress from Itself: Emancipating the States & Empowering Their People

James L. Buckley

New York: Encounter Books, 2014, 102 pp.

"The United States faces two major problems today," writes James L. Buckley: "runaway spending that threatens to bankrupt us and a Congress that appears unable to deal with long-term problems of any consequence." Contributing significantly to both, he argues, are the more than 1,100 federal grants-in-aid programs Congress has enacted--federal grants to state and local governments, constituting 17 percent of the federal budget, the third-largest spending category after entitlements and defense, with costs that have risen from $24.1 billion in 1970 to $640.8 billion in fiscal 2015. His "modest proposal"? Do away with them entirely, thereby saving Congress from itself while emancipating the states and empowering their people. If that sounds like a program for reviving constitutional federalism, it is.

Judge Buckley has the distinction of having served in all three branches of the federal government, first as a senator from New York from 1971 to 1977, then as Undersecretary of State for Security Assistance in the Reagan administration and later as president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and finally as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, to which he was appointed in 1985 and from which he took senior status in 1996. But it was after he retired to his home in Sharon, Connecticut, that he began drawing on this wealth of experience, on his local newspapers, and on work of the Cato Institute's Chris Edwards to put together the ideas and evidence that fill this slim volume, culminating in his modest proposal.

And evidence there is--example after example of how Congress taxes Americans across the country and then, after deducting Washington's share of the monies, sends the rest to the far corners of the nation to underwrite projects that local special interests may want but that local taxpayers, if they had a direct say in the matter, would never support with their own money, but now do in the belief that the federal government is paying the bill.

Take the author's favorite example, a $430,000 grant from the Federal Safe Routes to School Program for widening sidewalks bordering two streets leading to a local school in Plymouth, Connecticut, population 12,000--the stated purpose, to fight obesity by encouraging children to walk or bicycle to school. If Plymouth parents had been offered that money to battle their children's obesity, Buckley writes, "it is anything but obvious that broadening sidewalks would have been their weapon of choice." They accept the money "because they know that those recycled dollars will otherwise be spent widening sidewalks in another state"--a fitting example of the perverse incentives set in motion by this five-year program, financed by $612 million of federal highway trust funds. (Note the ambiguity in "federal highway.")

There was a time in America when the federal government focused mainly on national concerns, the states on state and local matters, like the health and welfare of their citizens. That division of powers, the Constitution's federalism, was never exact, of course, and it shifted over time, but it remained largely intact for a century and a half. During the New Deal, however, it was upended. Today, under the kind of "cooperative federalism" at issue here, the federal government's tentacles reach into almost every area of life, areas once thought the exclusive domain of state and local governments--or of no governments at all. And the costs, monetary and nonmonetary alike, are richly catalogued in this book.

For the federal government, start with the expense of administering often overlapping programs that might otherwise be initiated and administered by state or local governments alone. Today there are 82 federal teacher training programs, for example, even though education is a traditional state function over which Congress has no constitutional authority whatever. A 2011 GAO report lists more than 100 programs dealing with surface transportation, 80 with economic...

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