I\u2019ve been writing a lot recently about what our federalized system means in terms of how it lets cities and states seek to constrain and even openly fight back against the federal government. The topic is most urgent when it comes to President Donald Trump\u2019s authoritarian overreaches through\u00a0 mass paramilitary deployments \u2013 ICE agents sent to terrorize blue states and cities under the guise of law enforcement.<\/p>\n
Recently, though, something happened that got me thinking about the practicalities of federalization from a different standpoint, one that\u2019s less about the relations between cities and states and the government in D.C. and more about their ties to each other and the outside world. On Tuesday, New York State joined the World Health Organization\u2019s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network<\/a>, following a similar move by New York City<\/a>. It became the third state to do so, following Illinois and California. New York has joined the Governors Public Health Alliance, a coalition of 15 Democratic governors formed to maintain public health standards and vaccine access. Trump pulled the country as a whole out of the WHO last month.<\/p>\n As far as I can tell, this is the first time that sections of one country have joined this network, created to help the global community work together to quickly identify and respond to public health crises. There is a clear practical rationale for this, though there is also a symbolic one for New York specifically: we were the locus of a global pandemic, COVID-19, that has killed close to 70,000 people<\/a> across the state, even only counting confirmed deaths. On average, over two dozen New Yorkers have died from the virus each week since this winter began.<\/p>\n This catastrophe (which led to the creation of this very site) has indelibly shaped our politics, culture and society, and it was driven at least in part by chaos and inaction at the federal level and mismanagement by the state, then led by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, whose later disgrace was based in part by his COVID blunders and cover-ups. To have the state and the city both join this global alliance is a marker that we in New York are determined not to let something like this happen again, even if that means going off on our own and forming connections with global bodies that typically deal with national governments.<\/p>\n One consequence of the Project 2025-style vision to dismantle the central administrative state is that the federal government is intentionally making itself weaker and less influential, outside of its agenda to use law enforcement and prosecution to punish and dominate opponents. Cutting funds for or hollowing out all sorts of programs, from food inspections to housing assistance, means the federal government has less impact on daily lives and civic operations in cities throughout the country.<\/p>\n This is not a good thing; as I and others have written, it is hard for most people to conceptualize the scope and breadth of contemporary federal government functions. They would be extremely difficult for states and localities to replicate. Still, the upshot is that many are and will be trying to fill in where D.C. is stepping back, and probably engaging in more of these types of multilateral agreements with other states and potentially other countries and international organizations. What would it mean for states like New York or California to attempt to fully recreate something like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or the research funding streams of the National Institutes of Health? In practice, such significant endeavors would probably still require cooperation among states, but running directly between them as opposed to through the federal government.<\/p>\n States already do have various formal agreements and joint bodies. The Port Authority, as you probably know, is a New York-New Jersey joint entity to manage transit, ports and airports in what is one large metro area. Our energy grid is split into three regions<\/a>. Only one of them, Texas, is restricted to a single state. The others are massive systems that sprawl across the eastern and western halves of the country. What I\u2019m imagining is that such entanglements might multiply and transcend the traditional boundaries of joint infrastructure management. What if groups of states had agreements to jointly use their law enforcement to constrain unlawful federal government overreach, as I\u2019ve been advocating for<\/a>? Or could cut out the middleman and ink peer-to-peer understandings research, or education, or social services (imagine a housing assistance or construction fund that was pooled between several states)? It\u2019s not that difficult to picture.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve made the case for a reexamination of the concept of state authority (even states\u2019 rights, if you want to call it that). This has long been coded as a right-wing idea, harkening to states trying to maintain slavery or fight integration, forcing the federal government to come in and protect civil rights. Yet the idea of states using their power for good is not a new idea, and in fact states \u2014 most famously Wisconsin \u2014 also pushed back against federal fugitive slave laws, on the other side of the slavery fight. More recently, blue states have acted independently on issues like climate and gun regulation where the federal government has failed to act. In the era of Trump, there\u2019s ground to build on, not just as individual states but collectively.<\/p>\n And what about looking abroad? Cities and states have long had partnerships with, for example, sister jurisdictions in other countries, but these have mostly been symbolic gestures. The WHO network agreement, by contrast, is very practical. It\u2019s about data-sharing, coordination of personnel. It\u2019s a big deal, and I\u2019m sure it won\u2019t be the last such partnership. There are, of course, certain areas where it won\u2019t really be possible for states or groups of states to deal directly with other countries or international entities: things like trade, immigration and defense are very clearly federal prerogatives. New York, for example, could not really reach a trade deal with the European Union.<\/p>\n Still, a conceivable consequence of the Trump era could be a world where the United States itself begins to look a bit more like the EU in structure \u2014 relatively independent states that are bound together by one central government and currency but deal with each other and with the broader world as individual units. Obviously, there are significant structural and legal distinctions between the federal US and the EU, but I\u2019m speaking more conceptually here. A dysfunctional Congress, an illegitimate Supreme Court and a presidential administration apparently intent on self-immolation in regard to its own government functions could be the spark to have us join hands with like-minded states and cast off a bit on our own.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I\u2019ve been writing a lot recently about what our federalized system means in terms of how it lets…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":131520,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[56345,56346,56347,56348,56349,56350,9,24,55,54,56351,56,56352,63,56353,56354],"class_list":["post-131519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-blue-state-internationalism","tag-federalism-under-trump","tag-goarn","tag-governors-public-health-alliance","tag-interstate-compacts","tag-kathy-hochul-who-agreement","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-new-york-who-membership","tag-ny","tag-ny-public-health-sovereignty","tag-nyc","tag-project-2025-resistance","tag-subnational-foreign-policy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131519"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131519\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/131520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}