Let Our Communities Lead

T he key audiences for President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, according to an unnamed White House insider, were moderate Democrats, Never-Trump Republicans, and independents. With those groups in mind, Biden made promises that have — as we know from polling data, alongside applause from the Republicans in attendance — widespread appeal: building roads and bridges, reducing prescription-drug prices, reducing corporate tax shelters, and, of course, aiding Ukrainians beset by a brutal Russian dictator.

Biden’s address indeed might have marked a return to the pragmatist who campaigned in 2020 on a return to normalcy, but whose abrupt disappearance after his inauguration triggered a catastrophic decline in public approval, including a 21-point drop among America’s largest political bloc — independent voters. Unfortunately, however, Biden’s advisers couldn’t resist stuffing his address with offerings that they insist — despite all evidence to the contrary — Americans want. Biden’s speech became a microcosm of his first year in office, littered with proposals designed by and for the progressive wing of his party and dressed up in the language of community and the working class.

Worse still, from the perspective of those of us focused on state policy, Biden’s proposals threaten more of the blunt-force federal interventions that have exacerbated the very ills they claim to cure, all while undercutting state and local leaders who currently enjoy significantly more public trust than do federal agencies and officials.

Take, for example, the bipartisan $1.2 trillion infrastructure package that funds roads, bridges, rural broadband, and other items popular among everyday Americans. If allowed to run the course traditional for such laws, these funds might have aided a great many communities. Biden’s activist agency officials, however, can’t resist the temptation to creatively interpret the law’s terms in order to advance their Build Back Better agenda. Guidance trickling out of their offices reveals that standard formulas for allocating highway funding to states will be altered to reduce local decision-making and flexibility; enforce cumbersome environmental reviews that focus on climate change; prioritize electric cars; and impose race, gender, and other quotas at every stage from planning to bricklaying.

Speaking of wasteful pretenses at productivity, Biden has come full circle on the social value of corporations — from blaming them for inflation, to demanding that we subsidize them. Rather than entrust economic development to the state and local leaders who best understand their communities’ needs, Biden wants Congress to pour billions into domestic chip manufacturing, benefiting companies such as Intel, whose CEO attended Biden’s speech with top hat in hand. Somehow paying corporations to make products more expensively on U.S. soil is supposed to lower American prices.

So far as inflation is concerned, it was striking that Biden did not address the way that his pursuit of an Americanized version of European-style green policies — including restrictions on new production that will almost inevitably bring an end to the success story that briefly made America a net energy exporter for the first time since 1952 — will also mean higher energy costs, which are already skyrocketing. Energy independence would benefit American communities not only by lowering prices and sparking the economies of western states but by reducing our vulnerability to tyrants. But never mind all that; let’s just make more windmills.

There is perhaps no issue that affects middle- and lower-income communities more viscerally than crime, yet here too, Biden offered a mishmash of federal programs that avoided any mention of the contribution that progressive policies have made to sharply rising violence. It was extremely admirable of him to reject police defunding in no uncertain terms, but a hodgepodge of federal programs won’t undo a two-year campaign against police, who are retiring or resigning in alarming numbers. But if former Senate Judiciary Committee member Biden wants to proceed with constructive police reform, he can halt federal programs that reward property seizures and distribute military weaponry to local departments and foster some of the worst police abuses.

Regarding the pandemic, too, Biden offered meddlesome top-down interventions that ignore how communities actually work. Many of us who searched for Covid tests earlier this year found empty pharmacy shelves, thanks to Biden’s ill-fated decision to vacuum 500 million test kits from retail markets into the dedicated yet not altogether efficient arms of the U.S. Postal Service, where they will apparently remain “in transit” until the last case of Omicron has disappeared from the MSNBC chyron. Biden’s promise of abundant medical care likewise rings false, because thousands of frontline health-care workers lost their jobs due to his unconstitutional vaccine mandate. No matter the words in his speech, Biden’s administration has made it harder for communities to meet the health-care needs of their citizens. Little wonder voters across the political spectrum listed health-care costs as one of their top concerns in a recent Pew Research Center poll.

The federal government certainly has an important role to play in American life, but it stumbles every time it tries to enforce blanket policies — be they federal minimum wages, election-supervision schemes, or child-care subsidies — to address problems that state and local leaders understand more clearly, know how to prioritize more realistically, and can address in more targeted ways. Rather than pushing our states and communities aside, how about letting them lead for a change? They can hardly deliver worse outcomes than a federal bureaucracy whose swollen power and revenue is matched only by its hubris.