Are We Ready for a Downsized D.C.?

I t wasn’t quite the fall of the Berlin Wall. But it was still a notable occasion when “Black Lives Matter Plaza” began to be dismantled in Washington, D.C., a few days ago. The city had emblazoned the phrase on a stretch of road near the White House in summer 2020. Created at the peak of the left-wing political madness enabled by Covid-19, the plaza was one part virtue signal by a government left-wing enough to represent a jurisdiction more Democratic than any state, and one part thumb in the eye of Donald Trump, then president.

An unexpected consequence of that madness was Donald Trump’s return to the White House, after four years of a president who foolishly embraced the excesses of progressivism. Trump has devoted much of the first few weeks of his second presidency to vigorously assaulting the D.C.-centered federal bureaucracy. If he sustains this effort throughout his presidency, it could meaningfully reduce the Swamp — in ways the rest of us should welcome, but for which we should prepare ourselves.

The present condition of Washington, D.C., would surprise the advocates of the Constitution. That document did establish a federal capital district. But in arguing for the Constitution’s adoption, the Framers assumed that it would not be or become an obstacle to the republican form of government they advocated. “It ought also to be remembered, that the citizens who inhabit the country at and near the seat of government will, in all questions that affect the general liberty and prosperity, have the same interest with those who are at a distance,” Alexander Hamilton (as Publius) wrote in Federalist No. 84, “and that they will stand ready to sound the alarm when necessary, and to point out the actors in any pernicious project.”

It would appear, rather, that the Constitution’s opponents, the anti-Federalists, had a better handle of what such a jurisdiction would be like. “If we expect it will have any sincere attachments to simple and frugal republicanism, to that liberty and mild government, which is dear to the laborious part of a free people, we most asuredly [sic] deceive ourselves,” the Federal Farmer (possibly Melancton Smith) wrote. He instead expected it “must soon be the great, the visible, the dazzling centre, the mistress of fashions, and the fountain of politics.”

But as with the predictions of anti-Federalists generally, which can admittedly seem striking to a modern reader, the Federal Farmer’s apparent prescience is a product not of the Constitution’s adoption but of our deviation from its design. That D.C. should contain both a local government and a relatively new aspect of the federal government — namely the administrative state — was not inevitable, even if it is now the case. It was not inevitable that the states and the people would surrender their powers ever more increasingly to the federal head. And it was not inevitable that D.C. and its environs would become one of the wealthiest areas in the country, largely from the growth and centralization of the state, in a manner that makes them to a significant degree immune to the undulations and discipline of the market.

Thus, Trump and other Republicans in Washington have taken aim at all of these features. A congressional threat compelled the D.C. government’s removal of Black Lives Matter Plaza — a symbolic measure compared with the DOGE-driven reduction of the administrative state itself. The aggressive shrinking and restructuring of federal agencies, as well as of private contracts tied to them, may not confront the full extent of our fiscal and political problems. But they represent a significant shift. Just look at how angrily (yet impotently) elected Democrats, whose fortunes are tied inextricably to government largesse, have reacted. Beleaguered partisans, some of whom just a few years ago were aggressively pushing for Washington to become a state, have been so cowed that they are now toying with the notion of retroceding the entire District to Maryland to escape Trump’s wrath.

The vituperation these efforts have inspired attests to their necessity. It would be good for America if D.C. became less powerful and less important. Which is why Republicans should continue to rein in both the D.C. government and the bureaucracy housed in and around Washington. They should expect considerable resistance to both tasks. Over the past half century or so, and especially in recent decades, the Beltway has become a bubble that has insulated the capital region from the country as a whole. People have grown comfortable, even as the nation itself has suffered. Creatures of Washington will not take kindly to the prospect of this bubble being shrunken, or popped entirely. They already are not.

There will always be some place for Washington, D.C. The Constitution does establish it, after all. Even in a country returned fully to our constitutional design, there will be legislators, judges, and federal departments, all requiring staff. But the District doesn’t have to be such a vaunted destination for others. It need not loom so large in national life as it does now; nor does it need its own government to act with such incompetent, ideological, and unrestrained authority as it does now.

In his first inaugural, Ronald Reagan, the president whose demand that the Berlin Wall be torn down was eventually met, declared that it was his intention “to curb the size and influence of the federal establishment and to demand recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the federal government and those reserved to the states or to the people.” The form of self-government the Founders created, and in which Reagan believed, depends “in a higher degree than any other form” on the citizens themselves. So it is not just the obligation of those of us who want the federal establishment restored to its constitutional design to support efforts to that end. Less power in Washington will mean more power elsewhere — meaning an obligation on the part of those outside of D.C. to wield it responsibly.