Federal Executive Government Arbitrates and Facilitates our Common Interests¶
The intent of federal executive responsibility should be to arbitrate and facilitate the interests common to all united states local governments. Federal policy should be limited to ensuring the security of our shared future, which means that federal executive authority is all future-facing, and not concerned with the day-to-day responsibilities of governance and support of the citizens.
A future-facing federal government provides an easy to understand separation of concerns, where states are responsible for the well-being of their citizens, and the federal government defines the fundamental rights of our citizenry, safety, and economy. This limits the power of executive authority in a robust manner. Basically, it ensures that our federal government stays constitutionally oriented, and ensures that the United States stays a federation – and does not devolve the power of states as the principle bodies of government.
There are a few types of executive authority that emphasize this responsibility, namely responsibilities that fall into three general categories, enforcement of common standards, then management of common insurance and investment resources. These are all concerns that are most powerful when the buy-in costs and allocation is widely distributed amongst the beneficiaries, as is true across all states.
Too often we expect the federal government to solve our problems, rather than what our local governments can solve. Unfortunately this focus on the country as the problem solvers starts to become a self-fullfilling prophecy. Sure, by focusing our political and capital investments on the federal scale we can potentially solve problems with much greater impact, but federal investments and approaches are also much harder to craft at such a grand scale compared to state or local government policies. Too often, politics is treated as a belief system rather than a system of political and economic experimentation. Federal policy should only be implemented once there is solid evidence that a policy works. This means that there are solid examples of the policy working in multiple communities that properly represent the diversity of our nation.
The main categories of federal power come down to:
Enforcement of Cross-State Standards
Bill of rights, social security, EPA, DOT, etc.
Management of Cross-State Insurance
Executive command of the military. Disaster relief
Management of Cross-State Investment
Federal R&D: NIH, NASA, DARPA, etc.