Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously called states “laboratories of democracy,” by which he meant that American local governments were free to undertake policy initiatives that might help determine what ideas work—and what don’t. The Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan will likely be the biggest funder of local government experimentation in the nine decades since Brandeis coined that phrase.
Far from an actual rescue for local governments suddenly flush with cash, the hundreds of billions of dollars that Washington is sending around America have unleashed a flood of ambitious ideas meant to transform communities through vague, speculative, and untested programs that local governments are often ill-suited to carry out. Many of these initiatives are just versions of decades-old programs, with a new spin but the same questionable incentives. At best, the result will be billions of wasted dollars, though we shouldn’t discount the government’s ability to make things much worse. In any event, this can’t be what Brandeis had in mind.
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