Federal System Performance in Twin Crises of Health and Democracy

The state and local governments have found themselves on the front lines of both a 100- year pandemic and an electoral crisis in two profound tests of our federal democracy, as they've had to contend with sudden and severe revenue shortfalls. It's fair to ask: how have the state and local sector performed in the grips of these challenges that nobody saw coming one year ago? Typically, the highest operating priority operating of any level of government will be protecting the health and safety of constituents so that should be our governmental performance metric. And protecting the health and safety of their electoral processes has a clear metric we can all agree on as well: turnout percentage, right?

Pandemic-fighting

The picture is definitely and tragically mixed with regard to dealing with the pandemic. First, let's recognize that virtually all states and localities started out behind a self-imposed preparedness eight-ball: due to at least a decade of fiscal neglect, the state and local public health systems were ill-prepared and ill-equipped to play their traditional front-line communicable disease-fighting and containment roles. As the Kaiser Family Foundation reported last August: "Since 2010, spending for state public health departments has dropped by 16% per capita and spending for local health departments has fallen by 18%, according to a KHN [Kaiser Health Network] and Associated Press analysis of government spending on public health. At least 38,000 state and local public health jobs have disappeared since the 2008 recession, leaving a skeletal workforce for what was once viewed as one of the world’s top public health systems."

Often behind that preparedness eight-ball, in the absence of clear direction or effective coordination by the national government and in direct competition with other states for PPP and other resources, some Governors, state legislatures and counties nonetheless followed the imperfect and evolving scientific evidence and policy guidance from reliable sources - including those national government agencies which were only intermittently being permitted to provide clear guidance - and through strong executive action bent the curve of disease spread during the spring and summer, doubtless saving many lives, but at huge cost to their state economies and to state and local revenues.

And those states - heavily concentrated in the Northeast and industrial Midwest and on the West Coast - that took strong action in the spring and summer appear to be better able to deal with the well-predicted and more severe fall and winter COVID-19 outbreaks than states which did not. Interestingly, those (mostly "red') states that prioritized continuing economic activity at least as highly as protecting health and safety and are now paying the price through higher infection and death rates, aren't necessarily doing better fiscally either: reporter Patricia Cohen's excellent piece on the New York Times front page of 12/4/2020 "In Blue States and Red, Pandemic Upends Public Services and Jobs" does as good a job as any coverage I've seen of telling this fiscal as well as partisan political story.

Conducting Free and Fair Elections

The mixed (and blue/red divide-tinged) pandemic-fighting performance picture stands in clear contrast to the thankfully un-mixed picture of state and local government performance on their responsibility to conduct free and fair elections. This is a picture without any serious red/blue tinge: all the state and local government partnered with the few federal agency partners (e.g .the DHS Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency) able to resist the election- subverting efforts of President Donald J. Trump and under the most trying circumstances imaginable proved themselves able to secure their previously-vulnerable systems from foreign and domestic interference, and conduct free and fair elections with historically high rates of voter participation. So, now in addition to the first responders and healthcare and other essential workers we have all been lifting up for most of this year, we also now know to thank our state and local election officials, employees, and volunteers of all partisan affiliations who have been bravely steadfast in doing their sworn duties.

National Government as Fiscal Partner?

So, as the end of this politically and economically terrifying year approaches, will the Congress continue to short-change the states and localities fiscally and help ensure that the next few years will see the same kind of anemic recovery from the Greater Recession of 2020-2012 that their half-hearted stimulus produced in the wake of the merely Great Recession of 2008-2009? With the current group of fiscal stimulus package negotiators appearing to settle on $160 Billion in state and local aid instead of $500 billion they should be receiving to cover the tax and fee shortfalls they are projected to be incurring, the answer sure looks like "Yup" to this observer.

And the likelihood is that many of the states that did the best job in protecting their citizens' health and safety in the pandemic will come out on the very short end of the distributional stick of even that pitifully small amount. See Jared Walczak's sobering 12/1/2020 Tax Foundation analysis, if you don't believe me.