Last month, I attended the State Policy Network’s annual meeting, where a panel of state leaders discussed their efforts to disentangle their states from federal government control. Among them, my state’s House Speaker Cameron Sexton discussed how the Tennessee legislature recently created a task force to study the strings attached to federal education funding. After the panel, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds spoke to a group about her own Department of Government Efficiency task force launched earlier this year.
While much attention has centered around Elon Musk’s short-lived DOGE efforts in Washington, D.C., his rapid breakup with President Trump and departure from the nation’s capital portend that little will come of his efforts to permanently curb federal spending. While that is disappointing for those of us who value limited government, not all hope is lost. Task forces like those in Iowa and Tennessee are promising.
In fact, it’s the role of the federal government through our states that is both pervasive and rectifiable. More than ever, states rely on federal funding to make ends meet, and with every new dollar they take, they send authority and decision-making back to Washington in return. Because states generally manage their own budgets better than the federal government—most of them actually balance theirs every year—they have stronger fiscal footing to dial back their reliance on federal dollars.
Additionally, in most cases, the federal government cannot compel states to accept federal money. Thus, states can assess whether they can better provide services directly with state tax dollars, especially after cutting the waste involved in compliance with the directives tied to federal funding. Speaker Sexton gave an analogy of literal waste in his remarks. Tennessee’s task force uncovered that some 30% of school lunches get thrown away every day in schools across the state because federal requirements ban kids from taking home food. Tennessee could fund its own school meal program for at least 30% less by eliminating all that trash piling up as a result of an asinine federal regulation.
If other state leaders follow the lead of Governor Reynolds in Iowa and Speaker Sexton in Tennessee, we can create a critical mass of states that put Washington in its place. There are so many areas in which states can chart their own path and pay for their own services more efficiently and effectively, thereby restoring local control and reducing the size and scope of the federal government in the process.
Justin Owen is president & CEO of the Beacon Center of Tennessee, the state’s oldest and most influential think tank. He is also a contributing scholar for the ITR Foundation.
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