A whole new government world.

• Author: Boulard, Garry
• Position: Includes related article

IF THE NEW REPUBLICAN CONGRESS AND THE STATES MANAGE TO WORK IN TANDEM, IT COULD USHER IN A DIFFERENT APPROACH TO GOVERNMENT EVERY BIT AS HISTORIC AND LONG-LASTING AS THE NEW DEAL OF THE 1930s.

Six time zones and more than 4,000 miles separate the mountain- and glacier-surrounded state capital of Juneau, Alaska, from Washington, D.C. But lawmakers in both disparate regions - and almost everywhere else in between - are seeing 1995 as the first year of a bold new era in which the day of big government has finally seen its sunset.

"It is an unmistakable movement," says Gail Phillips, the new Republican speaker of the Alaska House. There the GOP picked up four new seats on election day, coupled with two more in the Senate, to give them majority control of the entire Legislature for the first time in a decade. "What the voters said across the nation, they said in Alaska: They want smaller government and less taxes. That's why so many Republicans got elected."

But while the reasons for the historic 1994 elections now seem beyond dispute, not everyone is certain what the results will be. In Washington, D.C., House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his Republican majority are passing measures aimed at fulfilling the GOP's much-analyzed "Contract With America," a set of generally conservative commitments on which the successful Republican congressional candidates ran in 1994.

Those commitments are clusters in a new universe whose core is a thing called "devolution," or "the great political impulse of the 1990s," as a recent observer for The New Yorker put it.

DRASTIC DOWNSIZING

Devolution in Gingrich's revolution means drastically downsizing both the federal government and the bureaucracy of Congress itself, primarily by reducing standing subcommittees and staff size. But devolution also means transferring the long-time and nearly omnipotent power of "The District" to the states, where new governors and state legislators will grapple with what stays or goes.

To some lawmakers, however, devolution raises as many questions as it answers - the biggest of which is: Are the newly emergent Republicans in the nation's capital and the state legislatures (where the GOP won nearly 475 seats in November) reading from the same page? Are we truly on the brink of an historic political realignment where power flows from Washington to the state capitals? Or will the 1994 elections ultimately look more like 1964? That year, Democrats picked up sweeping majorities at the national level and 528 state legislative seats, only to see the inevitable pendulum swing back two years later when they lost dozens of seats in Congress as well as 762 seats in the legislatures back home.

"There are many things we don't know yet about this devolution or revolution or whatever you want to call it," says Thomas Mann, director of governmental studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "We don't know what immediate effect the Gingrich Republicans will have on state legislatures when it comes to things like unfunded mandates and entitlement programs. Nor do we know yet how much the new Republican leadership in the states will truly be in agreement with the new Republicans in Washington once these tough issues have to be addressed."

DON'T DOWNSIZE THE FUNDS

Already some state legislative leaders foresee trouble between Capitol Hill and state Republicans if devolution means responsibility for administering programs without the money to pay for them. "If Congress takes a program like AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) and hands it back to the states saying, 'You run it, it's your state,' I think we can do it better," says James Fleming, the new Republican majority leader in...