Federalism and Subsidiarity
A decision belongs at the lowest level competent to make it well — and a leader's first act of integrity is telling people plainly which level that is.
From the Founder
I used to believe the mark of a good leader was that nobody left the room unhappy. I have paid for that belief. What I learned is that trying to make everybody happy is not kindness. It is a decision you refused to make, handed off to somebody else later, at a higher price. Sometimes you cannot bring everybody along on the ride. Sometimes the best course of action serves most people and costs a few, and you have to say that out loud instead of pretending there is a version where nobody pays. Jurisdiction is that same discipline in public form. There are things that are yours to decide and things that are not, and a leader who blurs the line to keep a room happy is not being generous. He is spending authority he does not have.
Executive Summary
Authority is not only limited in kind, as Lesson 8.4 argued; it is limited in altitude. Subsidiarity holds that a decision belongs at the lowest level competent to make it well — a principle stated in Exodus 18 long before it had a Latin name, developed by Pius XI in 1931 and by Kuyper as sphere sovereignty, and honestly limited by problems that genuinely exceed local capacity. For a New York City mayor this is not theory. The Charter makes him chief executive of the city; it does not make him chief executive of the subway, the schools' legal existence, the tax code, the prosecutors, or the courts. This lesson maps what the office actually holds, what Albany holds, and why promising the second while running for the first is the classic disqualifying error.
Learning Objectives
- State the principle of subsidiarity precisely, distinguish it from mere decentralization, and apply the competence test that determines where a decision belongs
- Trace graduated jurisdiction in Exodus 18 and Deuteronomy 1, including what the Hebrew sorting criterion actually is
- Steelman centralization at full strength — the cases where a higher level is genuinely the lower-cost, more competent, or only impartial decider
- Map, with citations to the governing instruments, what a New York City mayor controls, shares, and does not control at all
Teaching Manuscript
The Second Jurisdiction Question
Lesson 8.4 left you with a question about kind: which institution has authority over what, and what happens to the church and the state when the two are confused. This lesson asks a second question that trips up more leaders than the first, because it feels less theological and therefore feels safe. Not which institution — which level of it.
Here is what that looks like in the only city this course is finally about. A candidate stands on a debate stage in Queens and says he is going to fix the subway. The line gets applause. It is also, as a statement about what the office he is seeking can do, close to meaningless — and everyone on the panel who has read the Public Authorities Law knows it. He has just told eight million people something that is not true, in a room where nobody will correct him, about the single service most of them use every day. He did not lie about a fact. He lied about a jurisdiction, which is harder to catch and does more damage, because it is the kind of promise that gets discovered on the day someone needs it kept.
I want you to feel the weight of that before we get to the framework, because the temptation here is not corruption. It is compassion running past its authority. You see a problem. It is real. People are suffering inside it. You have a platform and a microphone and a genuine desire to help, and the sentence 'that is not mine to decide' sounds in your own ears like an excuse. So you say the bigger thing. And the bigger thing eventually costs you either your credibility or your constitutional discipline, and usually both.
The principle that governs this is called subsidiarity, and I am going to state it precisely because the loose version is useless. Subsidiarity is not a preference for small government, and it is not the same thing as decentralization. It is this: a function should be performed by the lowest level of association competent to perform it well, and higher levels exist to assist and to take up only what the lower cannot carry. The load-bearing word is competent. Subsidiarity is not a romance about the local. It is a claim about fit — that decisions made close to the people who bear their consequences carry better information, more accountability, and more incentive to get them right, and that when they do not, something has gone wrong that needs naming rather than papering over.
Call the framework the Jethro Ladder, after the man who first built one. It has rungs, it has a sorting rule for what goes to which rung, and it has an honest account of when a matter has to climb. Before you can use it in New York, you have to see it in the wilderness.
The Oldest Subsidiarity Text
Exodus 18 opens with a picture of a good leader failing. Moses sits from morning until evening judging every dispute in the camp himself. His father-in-law Jethro watches for a day and tells him plainly that what he is doing is not good, that he will wear himself out and the people with him, because the thing is too heavy for him. Then comes the design. In the NASB 1995: 'Furthermore, you shall select out of all the people able men who fear God, men of truth, those who hate dishonest gain; and you shall place these over them as leaders of thousands, of hundreds, of fifties and of tens' (Ex. 18:21). Four rungs. A structure of graduated jurisdiction built into Israel's civil order before it had a temple, a king, or a capital.
Now watch the sorting rule, because this is where the passage earns its place as the oldest subsidiarity text we have. Verse 22: 'Let them judge the people at all times; and let it be that every major dispute they will bring to you, but every minor dispute they themselves will judge. So it will be easier for you, and they will bear the burden with you.' The claim of this lesson rests on that pair of phrases, so go to the Hebrew. The words behind 'major dispute' and 'minor dispute' are ha-davar ha-gadol and ha-davar ha-katon — literally the great matter and the small matter. Davar has a wide range: word, thing, affair, case. Gadol and katon are ordinary size adjectives. What matters is what the criterion is not. It is not the standing of the parties. It is not who has access to Moses. The matter itself is weighed, and its weight determines the rung. Deuteronomy 1 gives the same structure from Moses' own retelling — 'leaders of thousands and of hundreds, of fifties and of tens' (Deut. 1:15) — and then adds the charge to the judges at the bottom rung: 'You shall not show partiality in judgment; you shall hear the small and the great alike... The case that is too hard for you, you shall bring to me, and I will hear it' (Deut. 1:17).
Two things follow that most treatments of this passage miss. First, escalation is built in and it runs one direction: too hard goes up. The system does not pretend the bottom rung is competent for everything. It provides a route for the case that exceeds it, which is exactly what a serious subsidiarity has to do or it becomes an alibi for neglect. Second, and this is the part leaders skip, the whole design presupposes character at every rung. Jethro's specification is not organizational. It is moral: able, God-fearing, truthful, hating dishonest gain. Distributed authority in the hands of people who are not those things is not subsidiarity. It is just more places for corruption to live, closer to the ground where fewer people are watching.
That is the honest structural warning for anyone who wants to devolve power. Decentralizing to a level that lacks capacity, or lacks integrity, does not honor local competence. It abandons people to whoever is strongest locally. You have seen this in ministries that pushed decisions to campuses with no leadership bench, in companies that pushed authority to managers who had never been developed, and in governments that devolved a mandate without the money or the people to carry it. In every case the language was empowerment and the result was neglect.
So the Jethro Ladder gives you three questions for any decision on your desk. Does this level have the knowledge the decision requires? Does it have the scale — the money, the people, the reach — to actually execute? And does it have the accountability, so that the people who bear the consequences can reach the people who made the call? Where all three are yes, the decision belongs there and taking it upward is an injustice. Where one is no, the matter climbs, and you say why.
Pius, Kuyper, and the Best Case for Centralizing
The principle got its formal statement in 1931. In the encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, Pius XI wrote that just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. Notice the moral temperature of that sentence. He does not say centralizing is inefficient. He says it is an injustice — a wrong done to the smaller body whose function was taken. That is a stronger claim than the one most policy arguments make, and it is the version worth teaching, because efficiency arguments lose whenever someone produces a bigger spreadsheet.
A Dutch Protestant had gotten to a related place fifty years earlier by a different road. Abraham Kuyper's doctrine of sphere sovereignty, laid out in his 1880 inaugural address at the Free University of Amsterdam and developed in his 1898 Stone Lectures at Princeton, held that family, church, school, business, and state are each sovereign in their own sphere, deriving authority directly from God rather than by grant from the state. The state's job at the boundaries is to keep the spheres from devouring each other, not to absorb them. Where Rome argued from a hierarchy of associations, Kuyper argued from parallel jurisdictions. Both land in the same place for a leader: authority is plural, and the assumption that whatever is important must therefore be yours is a category error with a long body count.
Now let me steelman the other side, at full strength, because a leader who cannot state the case for centralization has not earned the right to argue against it. There are at least four situations where the higher level is genuinely the better decider, and they are not edge cases.
The first is spillover. When the costs of a local decision land mostly on people outside the locality, the local decision-maker is structurally the wrong one — he is optimizing over a group that excludes the people paying. Air quality, water withdrawals, and communicable disease do not stop at a municipal line, and neither does a transit network whose riders live in seven counties. The second is scale. Some functions have fixed costs so large that fragmenting them is simply waste — you do not want each of fifty-nine community districts running its own actuarial pension analysis. The third, and this is the one that should make you uncomfortable if you love the local, is capture and impartiality. The most sustained assault on civil rights in American history was administered at the state and local level, and the correction came from above precisely because the local level was the perpetrator. Any theory of subsidiarity that cannot account for that is a theory built for a world that does not exist. The fourth is equity of provision. If a child's education depends on the wealth of the fifty-block radius he was born into, a purely local system has produced an outcome no one would defend on purpose.
Hold both. The presumption runs local, and the presumption is rebuttable. What subsidiarity forbids is not centralizing. It forbids centralizing without argument — the reflex that treats importance as a warrant for altitude. When you take something upward, you owe the level you took it from an account of which of the three tests it failed, and you owe it a path back.
Without scrolling back: what are the four rungs of the Jethro Ladder, and what determines which rung a matter goes to?
What a New York City Mayor Actually Holds
Now to the practical heart of this module, and the section a candidate should be able to recite. The New York City Charter is unambiguous about the office at the top: section 3 provides that 'the mayor shall be the chief executive officer of the city,' and section 8 that 'the mayor, subject to this charter, shall exercise all the powers vested in the city, except as otherwise provided by law.' Those two clauses are real power. Under section 6 the mayor appoints the heads of the departments and may remove them. He appoints the police commissioner under section 431. He proposes the expense and capital budgets under the budget chapter, initiates and negotiates land use through the uniform review procedure of section 197-c, and makes rules through the administrative procedure chapter. That is command of a workforce in the hundreds of thousands and an expense budget in the range of a small nation's. Do not let anyone tell you the office is weak.
Then read the four words at the end of section 8 again: except as otherwise provided by law. Here is what the law otherwise provides.
The subway is not his. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority was created by section 1263 of the Public Authorities Law as 'a body corporate and politic constituting a public benefit corporation' — a creature of New York State. The same section provides for a chairperson and sixteen other voting members appointed by the Governor with the advice and consent of the State Senate, of whom four are appointed on the written recommendation of the Mayor of the City of New York. Read that carefully. The mayor recommends four names out of seventeen votes and appoints none of them. Fares, service levels, and the capital plan are decided by that board. A mayor can fund, advocate, coordinate on the streets he does control through the Department of Transportation, and make himself impossible to ignore. He cannot direct the MTA, and the honest sentence is the one that says so.
The schools are his only on loan. Mayoral control of the New York City school system is not a home rule power; it is a delegation from Albany under Article 52-A of the State Education Law, enacted as Chapter 91 of the Laws of 2002, under which the chancellor is employed by and serves at the pleasure of the mayor. Critically, that statute carries an expiration date, and the Legislature has repeatedly renewed it for limited terms rather than making it permanent — which means every mayor holds the schools subject to a periodic vote in a chamber he does not sit in. And there is no constitutional floor underneath him: Article IX of the State Constitution, the home rule article, provides in section 3(a)(1) that nothing in it restricts or impairs the Legislature's power in relation to the maintenance, support or administration of the public school system. Education was carved out of home rule by design.
The tax base is not his to reprice. Article XVI, section 1 of the State Constitution begins, 'The power of taxation shall never be surrendered, suspended or contracted away,' and provides that any law delegating the taxing power must specify the types of taxes that may be imposed and provide for their review. The city levies what the Legislature has authorized it to levy. A change to the city's personal income tax is an Albany bill, not a City Hall press release. The prosecutors are not his either: Article XIII, section 13 of the State Constitution provides that in each county a district attorney shall be chosen by the electors, which in the five boroughs means five independently elected prosecutors, none of whom reports to the mayor. And the courts are a state system under Article VI, though the office retains real judicial appointment power — section 15 provides that the judges of the city-wide criminal court are appointed for ten-year terms by the mayor. Even the police commissioner is not held on the mayor's word alone: section 431 of the Charter provides that the commissioner may be removed by the mayor or the Governor.
How You Get Albany to Move, and the Sentence That Costs You Nothing
There is a moment in this city's history when every abstraction in this lesson became concrete, and it is worth knowing cold. By 1975 New York City had financed years of operating deficits with short-term borrowing, and the credit markets closed. In September the State Legislature passed the New York State Financial Emergency Act for the City of New York, Chapter 868 of the Laws of 1975, creating the Emergency Financial Control Board. Look at who sat on it: the Governor as chairman, the State Comptroller, the Mayor, the City Comptroller, and three members appointed by the Governor. The elected government of the largest city in the country had a minority voice on the board that could review and reject its own budgets and contracts. The board was later renamed the Financial Control Board and made a permanent fixture by law in 1986.
Draw the right lesson from that, because most people draw the wrong one. The wrong lesson is that Albany is the enemy of home rule. The right lesson is the one the Jethro Ladder already gave you: subsidiarity is conditional on competence, and the condition is not decorative. The city lost its autonomy because it had demonstrably failed the scale and accountability tests on its own books. Local control is not a possession. It is a trust that survives as long as the local level can carry the load, and every mayor's fiscal discipline is, whether he thinks of it this way or not, a defense of the city's right to govern itself.
So how does a mayor actually get something done that requires the state? Four things, and none of them are magic. First, sequence: the State's fiscal year begins April 1 and the city's begins July 1, which means Albany sets the parameters before City Hall adopts its budget, and a mayor who starts his Albany work in April has already lost the year. Second, the ask has to be an instrument, not a wish — a specific bill, a specific amendment, a specific line in the executive budget, with a sponsor in each chamber. Third, the City Council can adopt a home rule message requesting that the Legislature act on a matter concerning the city, which changes the politics of a bill without obligating anyone to pass it. Fourth, and most underrated, the mayor's real leverage in Albany is the delegation — the state senators and assembly members elected from within the five boroughs, who answer to the same voters he does and whose own re-elections run through neighborhoods he can move.
Which brings us to the disqualifying error, and I want to be direct because this is the most practically valuable paragraph in the module. Do not promise what you do not control. Not because it is impolitic, but because it is a lie, and because it is the specific lie that voters eventually punish hardest — the one that raised a hope inside a system that was never going to deliver it. There is a sentence that costs you nothing and buys you everything, and it goes like this: here is what I will do on day one with the authority I actually have; here is what I will fight for in Albany, here is exactly who has to say yes, here is my deadline; and here is what I will do for you if they say no. That sentence is longer than the applause line. It is also the only version a serious person can keep, and it turns out that people who have been lied to by four consecutive administrations can tell the difference.
Test yourself before you go on. Take the three commitments you say most often, in whatever room you lead, and name for each one the level, the instrument, and the person who has to agree. If you cannot fill in all three columns, you are not making a promise. You are making a wish out loud in front of people who will hold you to it. Lesson 8.6 takes the next step: once you know what is yours to decide, what happens when the law you are sworn to enforce is inconvenient to you personally?
Name three things a New York City mayor does not control, and the instrument that puts each somewhere else.
Through the Six Lenses
Evidence levels labeled per the Truth & Intellectual Integrity standard.
Biblical
Exodus 18:13-27 records the oldest graduated jurisdiction we possess: leaders 'of thousands, of hundreds, of fifties and of tens' (18:21, NASB 1995), sorting cases by the weight of the matter — ha-davar ha-gadol versus ha-davar ha-katon — rather than the standing of the parties (18:22). Deuteronomy 1:9-18 repeats the structure and adds a defined escalation route: 'The case that is too hard for you, you shall bring to me' (1:17). Jethro's qualifications are moral before structural.
Philosophical
Pius XI's Quadragesimo Anno (1931), sec. 79, calls it an injustice to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. Kuyper's sphere sovereignty (1880 inaugural; Stone Lectures, 1898) reaches parallel jurisdictions by a different route. The centralist steelman is serious: spillover effects, scale economies, local capture — the American civil rights record is decisive — and equity across unequal localities. The presumption runs local, and it is rebuttable by argument rather than by an assertion of importance.
Scientific
Public economics formalizes the fit question. Tiebout's 1956 model argues that mobile residents sort among jurisdictions offering different service-tax bundles, disciplining local government; Oates's fiscal federalism weighs that against externalities and scale. Elinor Ostrom's Governing the Commons (1990) documented durable local regimes that neither privatization nor central control predicted. Note the limits honestly: Tiebout assumes mobility and information poor residents often lack, and the literature on optimal assignment remains contested.
Historical
New York City's home rule has never been unconditional. The Financial Emergency Act for the City of New York, Chapter 868 of the Laws of 1975, created the Emergency Financial Control Board — the Governor as chairman, the State and City Comptrollers, the Mayor, and three gubernatorial appointees — with review over city budgets and contracts. Renamed the Financial Control Board and made permanent in 1986. The precipitating failure was the city's own: years of operating deficits on short-term debt.
Influence
The applause line that overpromises jurisdiction exploits what Cialdini's commitment research describes — a public, self-defining pledge that binds later behavior. But the audience cannot verify the jurisdiction, so the commitment is manufactured on false pretenses and would not survive full disclosure. That is Module 5's manipulation test, failed. The candidate who names the level, the instrument, and the veto player spends short-term applause to buy durable credibility — a trade that compounds.
Executive
Charter sec. 3 makes the mayor chief executive; sec. 8 grants the city's powers 'except as otherwise provided by law,' and that clause does the real work. Public Authorities Law sec. 1263 places the MTA under gubernatorial appointment; Education Law Art. 52-A makes school governance a renewable Albany delegation; NY Const. Art. XVI sec. 1 keeps the taxing power with the State; Art. XIII sec. 13 elects district attorneys independently.
Case Study
Mayoral Control, 2002: Buying Authority on a Lease
SITUATION. Michael Bloomberg took office in January 2002 arguing that no one could be held accountable for New York City's schools because no one actually ran them; governance sat with a seven-member Board of Education appointed by six separate officials — the mayor, who named two members, and the five borough presidents, who named one each. CONSTRAINTS. School governance is not a home rule power. Article IX, section 3(a)(1) of the State Constitution provides that nothing in the home rule article restricts the Legislature's power over the maintenance, support or administration of the public school system. Only Albany could grant what he wanted. DECISION. He went to the Legislature and obtained Article 52-A of the Education Law, enacted as Chapter 91 of the Laws of 2002, making the chancellor an employee serving at the mayor's pleasure — and accepted a statutory expiration date as the price. ANALYSIS. He gained genuine executive authority over a system serving roughly a million children. He also converted a permanent question into a recurring one: because the statute sunsets, every successor must return to a chamber he does not sit in and ask for the power again. Authority received by delegation is authority held on a lease. DISCUSSION. Where in your own leadership do you hold power by delegation rather than by right — and what is your plan for the renewal conversation you have been treating as automatic?
Reflection Questions
- Name a decision you made in the last year that belonged one level below you. What did you gain by taking it, and what did the person you took it from lose?
- Which of the three competence tests — knowledge, scale, accountability — does your organization most often fail at the level closest to the work? What would fixing that cost?
- Where have you used the language of empowerment to devolve a responsibility without the resources or authority to carry it? Who paid?
- Write the honest version of your most-repeated promise: the level, the instrument, the person who must say yes, and what you will do if they refuse. Does it still sound like something you can say in public?
Practical Exercise — The Jurisdiction Map
Take the five commitments you make most frequently — in a campaign, a company, or a congregation. For each, build four columns: (1) the decision itself, stated as an action; (2) the level that actually decides it; (3) the specific instrument required (a Charter section, a state bill, a board vote, a budget line, a signature); (4) every person or body whose yes is necessary. Then add a fifth column: what you will do with the authority you do hold if the necessary yes never comes. Rewrite each commitment as one sentence that contains all five. Read the rewritten set aloud to someone who is willing to argue with you, and keep only the ones that survive.
Assessment
This Week’s Commitment
Take the three promises you make most often — in your campaign, your company, or your ministry. For each, write down the level and the legal or organizational instrument that actually decides it, and who has to say yes. Then rewrite each promise so it is true. Do this on paper this week, and say the rewritten version out loud to someone who will push back.
Identity statement to carry this week: “I am a steward of a specific jurisdiction, not a savior of every problem inside my line of sight. I will name what is mine to decide, name what is not, and be as honest about the second as I am confident about the first.”
Discussion Questions
- Steelman the centralist: give the strongest case that a state-run MTA serving a seven-county region is the correct design, not a defect to be fixed.
- If local autonomy is conditional on local competence, who gets to judge competence — and what stops that judgment from becoming a pretext?
- Is there any promise a candidate may honestly make about a matter outside his jurisdiction? Draft one, and defend the wording.
Reading List
- Exodus 18:13-27 and Deuteronomy 1:9-18 — graduated jurisdiction and the escalation rule
- Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno (1931), sec. 79-80 — the classic formulation of subsidiarity
- Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism (Stone Lectures, 1898) — sphere sovereignty
- The Federalist No. 45 (Madison) — the division of authority between general and state governments
- New York Constitution, Article IX (Local Governments) and Article XVI, sec. 1 (Taxation); New York Public Authorities Law sec. 1263 (MTA)
- Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. 1 — the New England township as a school of self-government
- Charles R. Morris, The Cost of Good Intentions: New York City and the Liberal Experiment (1980)