The Problem of Overcentralization

A perennial debate underlying politics in the United States is how strong the federal government should be in relation to individual state governments. This argument famously played a role in the founding of our nation, with the arguments between Alexander Hamilton and others, who favored a stronger federal government, versus Thomas Jefferson and others, who favored a weaker federal government. This tension resurfaced during the Civil War, where states’ rights arguments were invoked to defend secession and slavery. The debate surfaced once more with FDR’s New Deal expanding federal power to deal with the Great Depression. These are just a few examples present throughout our history, arriving at today’s familiar battle between “small government” and “big government”. Through this article I seek to enter this debate and argue in favor of subsidiarity, a model of governance that is not simply weak, but right-sized.

Overcentralization is the problem subsidiarity addresses: distant governments trying to do too much inevitably end up doing it poorly, often harming the ability of local governments to effectively govern their people. The issue with overcentralization is simple: the government in Washington D.C., facing countless other issues and topics, cannot effectively govern at the local level. Two recent examples where overcentralization has sparked conflict are education and abortion. A federal government cannot effectively educate millions of children across thousands of miles of varied communities, nor can it fairly adjudicate deeply personal questions, like abortion, for peoples with vastly different cultures and values. It is precisely this gap, between what central governments attempt and what they can reasonably achieve, that subsidiarity seeks to address by finding a “right-sized government” where decisions are taken at the lowest level capable of handling them well.

How Did We Get Here?

Overcentralization was not the ideal of our country’s founders. So how did it get to this point? Why did the government continue down a path at odds with the founding ideology and toward worse outcomes? Two causes stand out in particular: public choice theory and the ratchet effect.

Public choice theory is the idea that government failure is not accidental at all, but rather the predictable output of a system where individual incentives differ from the public good. Politicians are incentivized to win elections, and to do so, they need to support visible programs that voters notice. Federal programs are more visible than local ones; thus, a politician has a better chance of increasing their base through national initiatives rather than local ones. Bureaucrats are incentivized to maximize their agency’s budget, as their salary, influence, and job security are all correlated with the size of their agency’s budget and its jurisdiction. Therefore, agencies expand their mandates over time, budgets increase regardless of performance, and programs that fail are rarely eliminated but rather reformed, renamed, and refunded. Subsidiarity seeks to solve this problem by dispersing power, which disperses the incentive to capture it. Fifty competing state governments, each handling education or environmental regulation differently, create a natural laboratory that makes failure visible and success repeatable. Citizens can “vote with their feet” by comparing outcomes across states and moving toward better-governed ones. Now, local governments are not immune to capture, instead being captured by smaller and more local interests. A local government can be dominated by a single developer in the same way Washington can be dominated by a national industry. Subsidiarity does not entirely fix this problem; it scales it down and makes it more visible. It is not a total cure, but it is a significant improvement.

The ratchet effect, most rigorously documented by economist Robert Higgs, is the tendency for government to expand during crisis but never contract after. The pattern is simple: a crisis creates public demand for federal action. Congress and the executive respond by creating new agencies, programs, and authorities. They are often framed as temporary emergency measures, but once the crisis passes, the agencies and programs do not go away. They continue to develop and expand, eventually becoming embedded in the budget. The ratchet effect is one of the strongest arguments for subsidiarity as constitutional architecture as opposed to political will. Political will is insufficient because the incentives work against it. Politicians proposing to return authority to the states face organized opposition from the federal agencies that would lose influence, budget, and employment. This is why subsidiarity must be built into constitutional architecture rather than left to political goodwill, which always operates against the current.

The Meaning and Origins of Subsidiarity

Subsidiarity is a governance model where higher levels of authority exist to support, not replace, smaller communities; they intervene only when lower levels cannot achieve common goods. This model traces back to Aristotle’s concept of layered communities (family, village, city-state) and the idea that higher communities should not interfere in matters lower ones can handle. It was picked up again through traditions of federalism and local self-government, with Alexis de Tocqueville documenting American township governance in Democracy in America. The concept of subsidiarity is most formally defined in Catholic Social Teaching, where subsidiarity is framed as a moral obligation, not merely a political preference.

Aristotle’s principle of non-interference holds that the village should refrain from issues a household can handle, and the city-state should refrain from issues the village can handle.¹ Pope Pius XI argues in Quadragesimo Anno (1931) that assigning to higher bodies what lower bodies can do is a “disturbance of right order,” and that the State should let subordinate groups handle “matters and concerns of lesser importance.”² The Fordham Urban Law Journal provides a modern perspective, stating that subsidiarity provides a criterion for deciding whether local, regional, national, or supranational bodies should act.³

Subsidiarity vs. Federalism

In certain contexts, subsidiarity sounds very similar to federalism. They are related, but distinct. Federalism is a constitutional arrangement, while subsidiarity is a moral principle; where federalism asks “what does the Constitution permit?”, subsidiarity asks “what does justice require?” Both distribute power across levels of government, and both seek to control excessive centralization. However, federalism is primarily concerned with limiting federal power; subsidiarity, by contrast, obligates higher levels to act when lower levels genuinely cannot manage on their own. A purely federalist framework could justify leaving local communities without support on the grounds that federal intervention is constitutionally suspect. Subsidiarity rejects this, demanding that higher powers not only stay out of what lower levels can handle, but also actively support lower levels when the need arises. The relationship between levels of government is not one of separation but of mutual responsibility.

However, the most fundamental difference between federalism and subsidiarity is what relationships they primarily affect. Federalism is largely limited to the federal government versus the state government, while subsidiarity operates across more levels: from individuals, to family, to municipalities, to the state, and to the national/federal level. It recognizes that the state is not the only alternative to federal power, and much of what even state governments currently do could be handled by local institutions that federalism largely ignores. For example, my home state of Florida has seen increasingly centralized education, even going so far as mandating specific instructional methods for reading, curriculum content, and rigid classroom requirements that apply identically to a rural district in the Panhandle and an urban district in Miami-Dade. These should be handled by local school boards, directly elected by the communities they serve, and not mandated from Tallahassee to districts with nothing in common beyond the state they are in.

How Centralization Creates Fragility

When the top level tries to do what lower levels could do, it becomes overloaded, clumsy, and oppressive, while alienating its citizens. Concentrating too many functions in one distant government leads to decision overload and paralysis, ignorance of local knowledge and context, and generalized one-size-fits-all policies that end up fitting nobody well. These failures can be observed in our modern government, where the government is given so much responsibility that it often fails to do anything well. Its solution, which never seems to work, is to throw more money into a losing system. The Cato Institute highlights duplication and fragmentation as concrete side effects of trying to do too many things from too far away, where dozens of similar programs spread across different agencies make oversight and performance evaluation difficult, if not impossible.⁴ ⁵

Education and environmentalism are two issues that the federal government simply cannot do better than local governments. Federal education tends to ignore the differences in culture between rural and urban areas.⁶ Critics tend to point out the correlation between the 1979 founding of the Department of Education and the plummeting test scores that followed. Mississippi experienced the “Mississippi Miracle” when local initiatives dramatically improved their test scores, going from 48th nationwide in 2013 (for fourth-grade reading) to 3rd in 2024.⁷ Furthermore, federal programs like No Child Left Behind and Common Core often received criticism from rural communities. Allowing local levels to handle their own education allows them to use a model that fits their population better.

Environmental regulation presents the same pattern. Federal regulations like the Endangered Species Act, when applied to Western water disputes, led to California farmers being pitted against Washington bureaucrats over local water that both fish and farms depend on.⁸ The Clean Air Act often penalized rural counties near major cities for pollution they did not produce, ignoring local context.⁹ The expansion of the Endangered Species Act, allowing it to apply to private land, took local landowners out of critical processes and decisions where they had far better knowledge of their land than the federal agencies making those decisions did.¹⁰

When problems arise on the local level, local communities should not have to wait for a federal government to deal with its countless other priorities before it finally addresses theirs. During Hurricane Katrina, FEMA’s delayed and disorganized response became a well-documented example of federal sluggishness costing lives, while many immediate relief efforts were driven locally.¹¹ Furthermore, in 1996, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act gave states the flexibility to design their own welfare programs; in the years following this reform, “the economic well-being of single mothers improved substantially”.¹² Decentralization improves responsiveness and local accountability.

Information Theory and Legibility: Why Centralization Cannot Work

Friedrich Hayek’s The Use of Knowledge in Society¹³ argues that the knowledge required to make good decisions is dispersed across millions of individuals, each holding small pieces of local, contextual, and often tacit information that cannot be fully communicated upward to a central authority. The federal government does not fail at education and environmental regulations because it hired the wrong people or spent too little money. It fails because the information required to govern well at the local level simply does not exist in a form that Washington can access. This is not a problem that better data collection can solve. James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State (1998)¹⁴ extends this argument: to manage at scale, central authorities must simplify complex local realities into standardized categories, and this simplification destroys the very variation that makes local systems resilient. No Child Left Behind and Common Core did not fail because their designers were incompetent. They failed because they imposed a standardized, legible framework onto an educational reality that cannot be meaningfully reduced to a single standard. The Panhandle classroom and the Miami-Dade classroom look the same at the federal level. They are not, and treating them as if they were destroys the local adaptations that made each work. Federal policy often feels disconnected from lived reality because it is governing an abstraction rather than the community itself.

The Architecture of Subsidiary Governance

A well-designed system of subsidiarity is based on “nested responsibility”: from individuals, to family, to civic associations, to municipalities, to the state, and finally to the national/federal level. Tasks should be taken as close to the affected parties as possible, and higher levels should support where they can, only stepping in when lower levels genuinely lack the capacity or when issues transcend local boundaries. There should be a simple test when deciding where the power belongs for a particular issue. First, can the task be handled by individual initiative? If not, can it be handled collectively by the local community? If not, can it be handled by regional, or state, authorities? Only when these levels clearly lack the reach or resources should the responsibility move upward. In a subsidiary order, higher levels play three main roles: they enable lower bodies by providing resources and expertise, coordinate common standards to avoid fragmentation, and act as a backstop when lower authorities collapse or abuse their power. What higher levels should not do, as a rule, is treat lower governments as branch offices, rather than the governments that they are. This is a structured hierarchy of competence, not chaos or radical individualism.

Of course, not everything can be local. Some realities are inherently larger than any municipality: currency stability, national defense, large-scale infrastructure, and more. Subsidiarity does not deny this; it clarifies it. Matters that truly transcend local boundaries belong higher up, but even there, decision-makers should lean on local knowledge and leave as much room as possible for local adaptation. National minimum standards in areas like environmental protection or labor rights, for example, can work with considerable local experimentation. When the national government is freed from responsibilities better handled elsewhere, it can address the matters that genuinely require its attention, leading to a stronger and more effective union.

Intervention Criteria

The three-question test outlined above is useful for quick decisions, but a more formal set of conditions should outline when higher intervention is justified. Four conditions should trigger upward intervention:

Capacity failure: when the lower level lacks the resources, expertise, or infrastructure to handle the issue. For example, a rural county cannot build an interstate highway.
Rights violations: when the lower level fails to protect the basic rights of its citizens, whether through corruption, discrimination, or just neglect.
Cross-boundary spillover: when the issue at hand crosses jurisdictional lines and cannot be managed by a single lower-level authority on its own. For example: air pollution and pandemic response are issues where the problem is larger than any local jurisdiction.
Coordination failures: when multiple lower-level authorities need to coordinate but cannot self-organize to do so. For example: interstate commerce standards, railroads, and electrical grid compatibility historically required national coordination.

When one of these conditions is met, higher level intervention should be done in the least intrusive way possible. Higher levels should provide support and coordination rather than assuming direct control when partial intervention suffices.

The Role of Civil Society

The subsidiarity hierarchy outlined at the start of this section includes a very important step: civic associations. This includes religious institutions, professional guilds and labor unions, neighborhood groups, and private charities. This layer is not governmental, but it performs an enormous amount of the work that subsidiarity assigns to the space between the individual and the state. What Alexis de Tocqueville admired about early American civic life was not its government structures but rather the tendency of Americans to organize to solve problems without waiting for government at any level to act. A fully developed subsidiarity framework treats civil society as the primary institution for addressing social needs, with government at any level serving as a backstop to support these groups when they cannot manage. A subsidiarity-based government should actively protect civil institutions, rather than crowding them out with public programs. It would prefer contracting or supporting existing community organizations, not creating new agencies. It would recognize that a neighborhood association or local church performing social functions is not a gap to be filled by government but a feature to be preserved.

Fiscal Subsidiarity

Subsidiarity does not work unless lower levels of governance have the resources needed to take on more responsibilities. A local government being told it is responsible for education but remaining dependent on federal transfers is not self-governing but rather administering federal priorities under a local façade. Fiscal subsidiarity has a few components. First, the level of government that makes spending decisions should, as closely as possible, be the level that raises the revenue. When this is not the case, politicians spend money they did not raise, voters cannot connect their taxes to services, and the incentive to spend efficiently disappears. Second, intergovernmental transfers should take the form of block grants rather than categorical grants when possible. Categorical grants come with specific conditions that effectively transfer decision-making authority upward even if money flows downward. Block grants, by contrast, provide resources while preserving local discretion about how to deploy them. Third, local governments need genuine independent taxing authority. A municipality that can only raise revenue through state-permitted mechanisms and federal transfers is fiscally dependent, regardless of its constitutional status. Meaningful fiscal autonomy requires the legal authority to tax, the political will to use it, and a tax base that can fund genuine self-governance.

Subsidiarity and Human Dignity

Subsidiarity is deeper than simply organization for efficiency; it respects human agency and the role of communities, whereas overcentralization infantilizes and isolates the people it claims to serve. People flourish when they are responsible for their communities, rather than passive recipients of services handed down from above. Families and local communities are where people learn cooperation, leadership, and civic virtue. Subsidiarity invites participation and responsibility at every level. When a local disaster occurs, neighbors and municipal authorities coordinate, building trust and competence that no federal program can replicate. When everything waits on distant bureaucracy, effectiveness and dignity suffer. Alexis de Tocqueville, referenced earlier in this article, specifically observed how local civic participation in early America built the culture of self-reliance that defined its civic life. Other writers, like Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone,¹⁵ argue that the expansion of centralized government has coincided with a decline in local civic institutions like churches, clubs, and neighborhood associations. Subsidiarity, in this light, is not merely a governance model but also a framework for rebuilding the civic fabric that centralization has diminished.

Challenges and Misconceptions

Subsidiarity is not anarchic localism, nor an excuse to neglect issues, nor is it rebranded libertarianism. Pure libertarianism trends toward a weak central government, effectively replacing national governance with local governance; by contrast, subsidiarity strengthens the government in places where it should be strong by ridding it of unnecessary responsibility that slows it down. Subsidiarity does not mean “leave everything to the local level”; rather, it requires higher levels to act when lower levels are unable to solve problems effectively. Subsidiarity is a balance between autonomy and solidarity: it demands strong lower levels and a responsible higher level that intervenes as a last resort for the sake of justice and the common good.

Subsidiarity is not a shield for injustice. Local authorities cannot simply hide behind “local autonomy” to maintain corruption or discriminatory practices. Under proper subsidiarity, higher levels step in when lower levels fail to protect basic rights or meet minimal standards. In these situations, higher levels have a duty to intervene. Furthermore, if decisions are made at a local level, voters can far more effectively hold decision-makers accountable.

Of course, one cannot simply flip a switch from centralized to local control without chaos ensuing. Subsidiarity is a long-term project of institution-building: higher levels should not hoard responsibilities because lower levels are weak; instead, they should help make those lower levels strong enough to take on responsibilities they rightly deserve.

The Civil Rights Problem

The historical record presents a serious objection to local autonomy. It was used in the American South for nearly a century to maintain a system of racial terror and legal subjugation. Without enforceable rights protections at a higher level, local autonomy can and did enable injustice. Earlier in the article, rights violations were listed as a valid trigger for higher-level intervention. Therefore, the civil rights objection is not an argument against subsidiarity but an argument for taking this dimension of subsidiarity seriously. The federal government must intervene when states violate the basic rights of their citizens; this kind of intervention was subsidiarity functioning correctly, not subsidiarity being overridden. Regardless of local preference or democratic majority, there must be a floor of non-negotiable rights beneath which no local authority may go. What those rights are could be legitimately debated, but the principle that they exist and higher levels must enforce them is not optional within subsidiarity. It is structurally necessary. Without such a floor, subsidiarity becomes a shield for local tyranny; with it, subsidiarity is a framework for human flourishing.

Capture and Corruption

Local governments are not automatically virtuous simply because they are local. In some ways, these levels are more vulnerable to capture than large ones: a single employer can dominate a small town’s politics in ways that no single corporation can dominate national politics. A corrupt local official operates closer to the people harmed by that corruption, but also closer to the people who might shield them from accountability. The answer to this issue is not to abandon local governance but to build in accountability mechanisms that make local levels trustworthy.

Transparency requirements are essential. Small governments that operate without public records laws, open meeting requirements, and accessible financial reporting are vulnerable to corruption in ways that larger governments with established oversight infrastructure are not. A subsidiarity framework should require that local governments meet minimum transparency standards as a condition of exercising genuine autonomy. Electoral accountability is the most powerful check on local capture, but it only works when elections are genuinely competitive and accessible. Subsidiarity’s human dignity argument naturally extends to ensuring that local democratic processes are free and fair; a local government captured by a single interest and insulated from genuine electoral competition is not practicing subsidiarity but small-scale oligarchy. Limited higher-level oversight also has a role monitoring local governments for signs of corruption, rights violations, or capture, intervening when necessary to perform exactly the backstop function that subsidiarity assigns to higher levels. The distinction is between oversight, which preserves local autonomy while maintaining standards, and control, which replaces local judgement with centralized direction.

A Vision for Renewal

Subsidiarity is not necessarily a novel concept. It is far closer to what our country was founded on than the current government is. Working toward this ideal would strengthen the federal government and allow it to focus on the things best handled at a national level. It would also reinvigorate local communities by inspiring civic involvement and growing that community’s connection to the place they call home. Individuals would be included in conversations and decisions that directly affect their lives, allowing the republic to operate as intended. It would allow states to regain their individual cultures rather than losing what makes them unique.

Imagine a society in which day-to-day problems that arise are solved locally, by your community and your neighbors, rather than by a faceless government that does not know you and often does not care about you. With subsidiarity, you get a supportive central government that provides frameworks and standards to ensure the local levels are meeting the needs of the people while otherwise leaving your community uninfringed except for when necessary. Such an architecture would rebuild trust between communities and the federal government while inspiring the civil engagement that defined early America. When power stays as close as possible to the issues and peoples it affects, government becomes less distant and abstract, and more connected to your daily life. State and local governments should act like governments, not merely branches of Washington D.C. The top level becomes leaner but more useful and effective precisely because it stops trying to do what others can do better.

Self-governance is not just efficient; it is what the republic owes its people.

Gérard François Dumont, “The Nation-State and the Principle of Subsidiarity.”
Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno (Rome: Vatican, 1931).
Nestor M. Davidson, “Federalism, Subsidiarity, and the Role of Local Governments in an Age of Global Multilevel Governance,” Fordham Urban Law Journal 37, no. 2 (2010).
Chris Edwards, “Bureaucratic Failure in the Federal Government” (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2015).
U.S. Government Accountability Office, “Opportunities to Reduce Potential Duplication in Government Programs, Save Tax Dollars, and Enhance Revenue,” report to congressional addressees, March 1, 2011.
John White, “How to Destroy Public Education and Rural Communities at the Same Time,” National Rural Education Association, 2023.
Kayla Missell, “Kids’ Reading Scores Have Soared in ‘Mississippi Miracle,’” PBS NewsHour, February 1, 2024; National Center for Education Statistics, The Nation’s Report Card: 2013 Mathematics and Reading, Grade 4, Mississippi (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, 2014); National Center for Education Statistics, The Nation’s Report Card: 2024 Reading, Grade 4, Mississippi (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, 2024).
Center for Biological Diversity, “California Lawsuit Challenges Federal Water Contracts That Imperil Delta Fish and Wildlife,” press release, May 20, 2020.
Clean Air Task Force, “EPA Proposal Lets Upwind States off the Hook for Ozone Pollution, Shifting Burdens to Downwind Communities,” January 31, 2026.
Ballotpedia, “Private Property and the Endangered Species Act.”
Chris Edwards, “Hurricane Katrina: Remembering Federal Failures,” Cato Institute, August 29, 2019.
June E. O’Neill and Anne Hill, Gaining Ground, Moving Up: The Change in the Economic Status of Single Mothers under Welfare Reform (New York: Manhattan Institute, 2003).
Friedrich A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review 35, no. 4 (September 1945).
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).

Cover image: The County Election by George Caleb Bingham, 1852

This piece represents an independent analysis intended to provoke thoughtful consideration of complex issues. Readers are encouraged to share perspectives, counterarguments, and join the discussion in the comments or on our X account at @OccidentalForum. Your contributions help refine these ideas in a spirit of reasoned dialogue.

Subsidiarity: The Case for Right-Sized Governance