2026 Federalism Summit

Federalism helps clarify a basic governing question: who is responsible for what? When that question is clear, constituents are better served because state leaders can act with more confidence, hold the right institutions accountable, and design solutions that fit local needs.

That constitutional balance begins with a simple but demanding premise: the people are sovereign, and they have constituted two governing institutions—state and national—each entrusted with distinct responsibilities to secure their rights. The national and state governments are not rivals, nor instruments of transient political advantage. They are partners in a shared constitutional project, each supreme within its proper sphere, and each obligated to respect the role of the other.

When jurisdictional lines blur under the pressure of politics, fiscal dependence, or administrative convenience—power drifts, accountability fades, and both levels of government are diminished. The result is not stronger national authority or more capable states, but a less coherent system of self-government, a distancing of government power from the people it is meant to serve, and a more frustrated public.

The Summit is organized around a modest but consequential ambition: to begin building a durable, nonpartisan commitment among the states to the preservation of constitutional structure, affirming the Constitutional protection of individual rights and state powers.

The goal of the summit is not theory for theory’s sake. It is practical self-government: helping states serve people more effectively, with clearer lines of responsibility and better tools for action. The Summit’s draft agenda emphasizes jurisdiction knowledge, practical tools, education, and state capacity as core objectives.

Next step: Attend with one or two concrete challenges from your state in mind, and use the Summit to identify which tools may help you address them.

The Summit is designed to give legislators a practical framework for leading in a complicated state-federal environment. You will hear from legislators, scholars, state agency leaders, and practitioners who are working through similar questions: how to oversee federal-state

programs, how to work constructively with agencies, how to protect constitutional structure, and how to strengthen state-level problem solving.

The emphasis is Structure Over Politics in Practice. Legislators may disagree on policy, but they can still share an interest in preserving the ability of states to govern responsibly within their proper sphere. The agenda also includes discussion of a practical toolkit states can adapt, including federalism commissions, agency interviews, education modules, fiscal analysis, and the sequence of Educate, Negotiate, Legislate, and Litigate where appropriate.

Next step: Come prepared to compare notes with colleagues from other states and leave with ideas you can adapt at home.

States still have a central role because they are not simply administrative units of the federal government. They are constitutional partners, entrusted with their own responsibilities to serve the people. The Summit begins from the premise that many states, across political perspectives, are encountering similar pressures in federal-state relations and need better ways to respond together.

The purpose is not to “turn back the clock.” It is to recover federalism in practice: clearer roles, healthier accountability, stronger state capacity, and more constructive cooperation between state and national institutions. The Summit will address the risks of centralization, why states remain essential, and how state leaders can work together through shared principles and interstate coordination.

Next step: Use the Summit to help define where your state can lead, where it should partner, and where it may need to speak more clearly about its constitutional role.

Legislators need more than concern; they need a disciplined process. The Summit will highlight practical tools such as state federalism commissions, reviews of intergovernmental relations, agency interviews, training modules, federal funds risk analysis, and shared principles for identifying genuine jurisdictional questions.

The agenda also emphasizes judgment. Not every disagreement with a federal agency is the same. Some issues call for education, some for negotiation, some for legislation, and some—when appropriate—for litigation. The Summit will also address how states can strengthen federalism while protecting civil rights and equal protection, including discussion of a possible Civil Rights Impact Framework for reviewing state legislation.

Next step: Leave with a short list of tools your state could realistically adopt or improve in the next legislative cycle.

Federalism can help legislators see their role more clearly—not only as lawmakers, but as stewards of their state’s constitutional responsibilities.

In practical terms, that may affect how you oversee agencies, evaluate federal funding conditions, ask questions about state-federal programs, design legislation, and respond when federal rules or guidance affect your constituents. The Summit will highlight tools such as federalism commissions, agency interviews, education modules, fiscal federalism analysis, and the practical sequence of Educate, Negotiate, Legislate, and Litigate where appropriate.

The goal is not to add another burden to your legislative work. It is to give you a clearer framework for decisions you already face: when to partner, when to push back, when to clarify authority, and when to coordinate with other states.

Next step: Leave with one practical improvement your state could make—such as an agency review process, a federalism education module, a new state constitutional amendment.

Federalism gives legislators a way to cooperate on structure even when they disagree on policy.

The Summit’s guiding idea is Structure Over Politics in Practice: states may reach different policy conclusions, but legislators can still defend each state’s authority to govern responsibly within its proper sphere. That creates space for red and blue states—and legislators within the same state—to work together on shared concerns: accountability, transparency, fiscal responsibility, civil rights, and the ability of government to remain close enough to the people it serves.

The Summit also recognizes that federalism requires habits, not just arguments: restraint, clarity of role, comity, and the ability to distinguish genuine jurisdictional questions from ordinary policy disagreements. Those habits can make difficult debates more constructive and less performative.

Next step: Use the Summit to build relationships with legislators from other states and parties who may disagree on policy but share an interest in accountable, constitutional self-government.

The best way to make the Summit useful is to approach it as a working session, not just a conference.

Come with a few concrete questions from your state: Where are federal rules, funding conditions, or administrative processes helping? Where are they creating confusion, delay, or accountability problems? Where could your legislature strengthen oversight, improve coordination with agencies, or protect both state authority and individual rights?

The Summit is designed to send legislators home with practical next steps: take the toolkit home, examine your state’s intergovernmental relations, consider legislation or oversight improvements, join working groups, and share what your state learns with others.

Participation should strengthen—not distract from—your work at home by giving you better questions, better tools, and a stronger network of colleagues facing similar challenges.

Next step: Identify one issue before the Summit where federal-state coordination affects your constituents, then use the Summit to test what tools, partners, or next steps may help.

The U.S. Constitution creates a federal system of government by separating powers and responsibilities between the national and state governments.

James Madison described this system as a compound republic that combines elements of unitary and confederal political systems. The consequence of dividing power between two distinct governments (national and state) and then subdividing those powers between branches of government, Madison claimed, would provide a double security protecting the people’s liberties.

Though unique in many ways, America’s federal system has historical roots in the Mayflower Compact that created a limited government accountable to the people, the colonial period when Britain largely neglected the colonies and allowed them to self-govern, and the Articles of Confederation that governed America through the Revolutionary War.

America’s federal system is dynamic. While the U.S. Constitution grants the national government particular powers and the state governments general powers, the actual mix and interactions between the national and states government is quite flexible. “The question of the relation of the States to the federal government,” future U.S. President Woodrow Wilson wrote in 1908, “is the cardinal question of our constitutional system. At every turn of our national development we have been brought face to face with it, and no definition either of statesmen or of judges has ever quieted or decided it.”

America’s federal system of government, since its inception at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, has taken many forms. In the last century, significant powers were centralized in the national government based on a belief that experts should decide policy, good government could be scaled, and centralized authority would create a national democratic union and national unity.

Referring to our contemporary political system, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote, “There is no significant aspect of national life about which there is not likely to be a rather significant national policy. It may be a hidden policy. … But it is policy withal.” In other words, the national government governs almost without borders.

And Madison warned that placing too much responsibility on the national government would shift power from Congress to the president. If asked to do too much, Madison reasoned, a deliberative body like Congress will become deadlocked and must defer decision-making authority to the executive which was designed to act with dispatch. The result is what we see today, each party advances its partisan preferences as far as possible when it controls the executive via executive orders and emergency measures.

That is not all. After nearly a century of growing nationalization, we see contentious populism and polarization, rising national debt, almost insurmountable obstructions to growth, harmful policy decisions, and declining K-12 students’ test scores. Each is problematic, collectively they are strong indicators of the inadequacies of centralization.

Speaking of the national debt, Alice Rivlin, Director of the Office of Management and Budget during the Clinton Administration, wrote, “The grim outlook for the federal budget makes it inevitable that in the near future strains between the federal government and the states over funding domestic programs will escalate into a crisis. . .. Federal decisionmakers will be forced to choose among extremely unpopular options—raising taxes, reneging on promises to the elderly, and drastic cuts in other spending, including money for state and local governments. . . Responding adequately to these widely felt needs will take constant attention to improving the functioning of our federal system.” The solution, Director Rivlin recognized, will not come from more centralization but a restoration of a functioning federalism.

In 1998, the Urban Institute warned that our contemporary policies have the potential to deprive Americans of their most basic commitment and identity, that of self-government. “Stripped down to its essentials, the American political process expresses a faith in self- government. It is the democratic faith that through argument, deliberation, and persuasion people are, in the long run, capable of discovering and promoting their common good. . . If one rejects democratic self-rule through public debate and deliberation, the only alternatives are rule based on the will of the most powerful, or rule based on deference to experts, insiders, whoever is seen as specially anointed to tell other people what to do.” 8 Self-government, the Urban Institute proclaimed, is the government we deserve.

Maintaining America’s compound republic to secure self-government was always going to require fighting against natural forces. Federalism is a compromise between contrasting desires to be big to fulfill a common interest (such as deter outside aggressors or create a common market) versus the desire to preserve the liberties from being small, local, and free. Federalism emerges from the desire to be both united for some things and autonomous for others. Sustaining that tension is difficult because the “natural tendency of any political community, whether large or small, is to completeness, to the perfection of its autonomy.” Federalism, political scientist Martin Diamond observed, is the effort to deliberately modify that tendency.

A similar thought was expressed by Alexis de Tocqueville nearly 150 years earlier when he wrote, “I think that in the dawning centuries of democracy individual independence and local liberties will be the products of art. Centralized government will be the natural thing.”

After a century of centralizing power in Washington, D.C., we should ask whether science has led us here or if we have used science to justify the natural thing?

The growing problems, dysfunction, and lack of solutions along our current path indicate a need to rethink our old choices. Perhaps direction forward may be found in a simple phrase that appears in many state constitutions: “A frequent recurrence to fundamental principles is absolutely necessary to preserve the blessings of liberty” We think it is time to recur to federalism, to consider it not as a pragmatic political compromise of 1787, but as a discovered, fundamental principle of good governance.