CONTRIBUTION
Where is America going?
With only a few weeks to go before the midterm elections, far more is at stake than the composition of the next Congress. America enters this election in an atmosphere of exceptional tension, with Washington, the states and the courts clashing over the very rules of the electoral game. Most recently, the Trump administration attempted to impose new restrictions on mail voting through the Postal Service. On September 14, after a legal battle in the federal courts, the Supreme Court ultimately blocked those measures from taking effect in November.
To reduce this conflict to yet another episode of American polarisation, however, would be to miss the point. The deeper problem facing the United States is not simply partisan conflict, but the fact that Washington has become so powerful that controlling it increasingly resembles a struggle for survival. How did a republic founded on the dispersal of power come to concentrate so much of it in the hands of the federal government? Why should a change of administration in the capital transform foreign policy, the bureaucracy and even local electoral rules so dramatically? Current distrust makes the question impossible to ignore: in the summer of 2026, only 55% of Americans said they were confident that the midterms would be conducted fairly, with scepticism cutting across party lines — 55% among Republicans and 58% among Democrats, according to the Pew Research Center. The problem is not the existence of a federal government. It is the collective amnesia surrounding what should legitimately fall within its authority.
A strong centre, but a limited one
The Constitution of 1787 was not born from an anarchist dream. Confronted with the weaknesses of a Confederation that had proved too feeble, the framers wanted a common government capable of raising revenue, providing for defence and regulating commerce. They wanted a strong centre, certainly, but not an omnipotent guardian. As James Madison put it in Federalist No. 45, the powers of the federal government were to remain “few and defined”, while those left to the states would be “numerous and indefinite”, extending to everyday life, liberty and property. The Tenth Amendment would later engrave that principle into the constitutional order: powers not delegated to Washington belong to the states or to the people. The founding idea was never a simplistic choice between small government and big government, but a more subtle balance: a centre capable of performing genuinely common functions, yet rigorously bounded so that it could not suffocate American plurality. It is that balance that urgently needs to be reopened.
When Washington becomes too important
Federal power did not expand overnight. The twentieth century saw Washington multiply its reach through regulation, social policy and an increasingly vast administrative apparatus. But power does not operate through law alone. It also operates through money. In fiscal year 2024, the federal government distributed nearly $1.1 trillion in grants to states and local authorities. In sectors such as healthcare, these flows account for more than half of their funding. Washington no longer even needs to compel; it can purchase compliance and make local institutions structurally dependent upon it.
This financial dependence creates an unforgiving logic: the more the centre decides, the more vital it becomes to control the centre. And the more vital that control becomes, the more every federal election turns into an existential confrontation. Yet the overwhelming media attention devoted to those elections conceals a massive withdrawal from civic participation. Across the 2020, 2022 and 2024 elections, only 41% of citizens voted in all three, while 26% cast no ballot in any of them. That absence cannot be reduced to indifference alone. It also reflects exhaustion with a system that demands everything from the citizen during the great national ritual of choosing who will command Washington, while offering remarkably little continuous control over the machinery that governs afterwards.
An empire at permanent war
It is in foreign policy that this hypertrophy takes its most spectacular and bloody form. Although the Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war, successive administrations have accumulated an extraordinary degree of freedom in the use of military force. The United States has gradually locked itself into an imperial logic in which the preservation of global hegemony becomes tragically entangled with the definition of national security.
The intervention in Iran, launched on February 28, 2026, has continued for months without any formal declaration of war by the legislature. On September 15, the House of Representatives was forced to vote, by 220 to 204, on a resolution intended to halt an unauthorised war machine. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the operation had already consumed more than $38 billion by August 1 and cost the lives of eighteen American service members.
This is the logic of an imperial presidency equipped with precisely the kind of destructive arsenal the founders were deeply wary of entrusting to a single man. The irony is striking: Donald Trump built much of his rise in 2016 around the promise of America First, attacking blind interventionism, nation-building and the waste of American resources in endless wars. That a president elected partly on the promise of breaking with this model should eventually activate the machinery of war in the Middle East himself illustrates the formidable inertia of the system. The problem cannot be reduced to the occupant of the White House. It lies in the sheer scale of destructive power entrusted to the office.
Draining the swamp is not enough
The same ambiguity appears at home in the promise to “drain the swamp”. The second Trump administration has made genuine attempts to bring the bureaucracy more directly under presidential control, notably by weakening employment protections for influential career officials through the Schedule Policy/Career category. In September, however, the courts slowed part of that effort by blocking a directive designed to assess the political loyalty of applicants for federal employment.
But weakening the autonomy of the bureaucracy in order to strengthen presidential control returns no power whatsoever to states or communities. It merely relocates the monopoly within Washington itself. A smaller administration controlled by a stronger presidency is not decentralisation. Draining the swamp is an illusion if the water is simply pumped into another basin of the capital.
Alternatives are trying to exist
It would be wrong to believe that America has simply resigned itself to the triumph of the centre. Intellectual and political currents from very different traditions are attempting to reopen the institutional question. The Libertarian Party argues for a radical reduction in federal power and an end to America’s role as policeman of the world, going so far as to defend a right to self-determination. The Tenth Amendment Center advocates resistance and non-cooperation with federal programmes, drawing in part on the Supreme Court’s anti-commandeering doctrine to limit Washington’s reach. Elsewhere, the Free State Project in New Hampshire seeks to build a local experiment around limited government, while movements such as the Forward Party argue for governance built from the bottom up rather than imposed from the top down.
The existence of these movements shows that America retains a deep tradition of refusing to treat Washington’s expansion as an irreversible fate.
Not fifty little Washingtons
Returning power to the states is only a partial answer if federalism is reduced to a blind defence of states’ rights. State capitals possess no greater inherent legitimacy than Washington when it comes to confiscating local autonomy. In the first half of 2025 alone, more than 800 state preemption bills were introduced to override local rules on housing, firearms, the environment and other issues. Replacing one federal Leviathan with fifty smaller Washingtons solves nothing if power simply hardens at a different level.
The demand must go further: political authority should be exercised at the closest level capable of acting without violating fundamental rights. Federalism has value only if it protects the levels beneath it. The state as a shield against Washington; the city autonomous against the state; the community free to administer its own affairs without permanent tutelage from Austin, Sacramento or the District of Columbia. At the end of that chain stands the individual, whose freedom must be protected against every layer of power.
The bureaucratic excuse no longer holds
For a long time, the sheer size of the country and the complexity of information provided a powerful justification for centralisation. Coordination and control appeared to require a heavy pyramid of authority. That world is disappearing. Artificial intelligence, open-source systems and cryptography are eroding the logistical argument for concentration. They do not make the federal government unnecessary, but they do undermine the assumption that every large-scale decision must inevitably travel upwards.
Technology can finally strengthen the periphery. States, counties and municipalities can cooperate horizontally and experiment without waiting for federal permission. At the top, the same technologies should allow a more focused federal government to limit itself to its vital responsibilities: defence of the Union, constitutional guarantees and major common networks. Technology does not abolish the centre, but it removes its final excuse. The question is no longer what Washington can administer, but what it is genuinely necessary to entrust to Washington at all.
Draining Washington
The 2026 midterms will shape the next Congress and determine much of the Trump administration’s room for manoeuvre. But continuing to fight over whose hands operate the levers of Washington without ever questioning the size of the machine itself is a profound mistake.
A federal government is not the natural enemy of liberty. The founders understood that the Union needs a capable centre. But that centre has no need to be omnipresent. The real alternative is neither the dismantling of the Union nor the construction of fifty paranoid fortresses. It lies in a demanding architecture: a centre strong only in those functions that must genuinely be common; states and cities radically free to act wherever they can; and citizens protected from the hegemonic ambitions of power at every level.
Only then can possession of Washington cease to feel like an existential struggle. Common power and local freedom are not opposites, provided we know where one must stop in order for the other to live. America’s problem is not that Washington exists. It is what Washington has come to believe it must become. The challenge of our time is no longer to conquer the capital. It is to drain it.
SOURCES
State and Local Government Review / SAGE Journals
INTO THE POSSIBLE / THE SUBJECT
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