Mitt Romney's Plan: Dump It on the States

On Thursday, Mitt Romney unveiled the latest in a series of bad ideas for taking government duties out of Washington and hiding them in the back rooms of state capitols. Mostly, Mr. Romney wants to allow states to quietly smother social programs the federal government has run for decades. In the case of his new energy policy, he wants to give states power to bypass Washington’s caution in burrowing for oil, gas and coal on federal lands. States, he said, could accelerate the permitting process for energy extraction, resulting in far more production than Washington has allowed. That’s probably true because many states have traditionally been poor stewards of their resources. They are far more captive than the federal government to the energy and timber interests that have long pressed for this concession and have far less oversight by government inspectors and journalists. No state, on its own, has an interest in preventing global climate change or reducing energy imports for strategic reasons. Those are national issues that need to be closely supervised by a government with broader interests than competing with the next state for oil leases. Bypassing those controls, which frustrates Mr. Romney and his generous supporters in the energy industry, are at the heart of his new energy policy. Mr. Romney has a long list of other core federal functions that he wants to dump onto the states. He has proposed offloading Medicaid and food stamps by writing a sharply reduced check to the states to take care of the health and nutrition needs of poor people. He wants to repeal health care reform and let the states design their own programs for the uninsured (or not). He wants to turn over federal job-training programs to the states, let them design their own unemployment insurance programs and give them a bigger role in designing immigration controls. (Of course, he is strongly opposed to giving the states flexibility in their welfare programs, lest they give money to a low-income family that isn’t working up to Republican standards.) Don’t be fooled by his claims that states can perform these vital functions “more efficiently” than Washington. They can’t. Battered by the downturn, states can barely perform the core functions they have. They have been laying off teachers and school personnel by the tens of thousands, cutting services to the poor past the bone and falling far behind on needed public works. Mr. Romney is really saying that education and safety-net programs are so low on his priority list that he doesn’t care what states do with them. If a blue state wants to pay for an adequate Medicaid and food stamp program, it is free to do so. But many red states care more about low taxes, and will not pay a price, no matter how much residents suffer. Many states are likely to compete in a race to the bottom to drive the poor into other states with governments that have a more enlightened sense of their role. In many ways, that is already happening. To use one measure, the Southwest region has had the nation’s greatest increase in child poverty over the last five years. But as Thomas Gais of the Rockefeller Institute notes in a forthcoming paper in the journal First Focus, states in the region have taken little action to deal with increasingly poor health and nutrition, along with declining education standards. Texas has been particularly disdainful of helping its huge uninsured population and cannot be relied upon to continue the new load of programs Mr. Romney wants to place on its shoulders. The true hollowness of these proposals can be seen in the demands by Mr. Romney and Representative Paul Ryan to drastically slash the amount of state aid provided by Washington. Ronald Reagan had a misguided idea in 1982 when he proposed a “new federalism” that would give states control of welfare programs in exchange for complete federal control of Medicaid, but at least he wasn’t proposing an abdication of Washington’s responsibility for the safety net. Mr. Romney wants to put these programs on the backs of state governments he knows cannot handle the load, then reduce the resources they have now. That may thrill a few die-hard opponents of government, but it could have disastrous consequences.