Bearing the Burden of the Beltway: Practical Realities of State Government and Federal-State Relations in the Twenty-First Century
by KATHLEEN SEBELIUS and NED SEBELIUS
Throughout much of the twentieth century, progressives relied on a dominant federal government to ensure that their policies were successfully implemented in the more conservative states. President Franklin Roosevelt demanded a federal solution to the economic crisis of the 1930s and gave America the New Deal. Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson each used the authority of the federal government to force states to accept suffrage for African Americans, the desegregation of public schools, and the slow, uphill march of the civil rights movement through the 1960s.
In response, when the conservative agenda took over the Oval Office with the election of President Reagan in 1981, state governments were promised a New Federalism—a relationship defined by a smaller federal government, with reduced oversight and greater freedom for state innovation.1 It was to be a new day for state initiative, free from federal meddling.
