Any good student, if you ask them to name the three branches of government, will rattle off the answer: executive, legislative, and judicial. Or they may express the answer as the president, congress, and the supreme court.

Either answer would get full credit from most teachers. But there is another answer that is probably more important. America’s public sector is administered by three distinct levels of government: national, state and local.

Consider the word “federal” for a moment. The right meaning of the word is “multi-level” or “shared responsibility.” It comes from the Latin word “foederus” which means an alliance or league of partners. It is common to use “federal” today when referring to the top level — the national level — of government. That word is, quite obviously, the wrong word to use for the level of government is that is consolidated and dominant over the states. In this site, we use “national” and not “federal” to refer to the US government in Washington.

Even apart from the meaning of the word, the three levels of government are not altogether clear cut. Some functions of the national government are administered in multi-state districts. Federal courts are sorted into 11 districts. Agriculture programs are administered in 10 regions that don’t align with the federal courts. Every major national program aligns differently.

States are, for the most part, clearly defined by their borders, which are clearly shown in maps. But sometimes two or more states form a regional group to deal with a shared interest such as flooding along a major river or border security. There is an interstate tax commission, and a Great Lakes Commission — both of which have membership of several states working together.

Local governments come in all shapes and sizes (cities, towns, school districts, library districts, enterprise development zones, historic districts, etc.) America has exactly one national government, exactly fifty states, and tens of thousands of local governments.

Most folks don’t realize it, but local government is by far the biggest, in terms of people employed. Nearly 14-million people work for local government (more than half of them in schools). State government employment is a bit under 5-million. The national government employs only about 2.2 million people, plus 1.2 million in the military and 600-thousand in the postal service.

American Government Employment, by Sector

The pie chart shows that the national government is the smallest level of government in the American federal system. But number of jobs isn’t the only way, or the most important way, to measure the size of these sectors.

The next chart shows the three level in terms of how much they spent in a recent year. The numbers aren’t exact because the sources I used were estimates. But they show that the national government spent more than state and local combined. National spending was about $4.8 trillion dollars. The 50 states spent a bit over $2 trillion, and local governments spent $2.1 trillion.

American Government Spending, by Sector

All of this is a long work up to the point, which is that Americans have too much interest in the national government. Mention “the government” without saying “local, state or national” and pretty much everybody will assume you mean the national part. Say, “They ought to do something about” some great social or economic issue, and pretty much everybody will assume you want the national government Washington to take the action.

My mother was pretty naïve about public affairs, and she honestly didn’t comprehend that “the government” was made up of several parts. Every annoyance, from taxes to regulations, was to her just another annoying thing ‘the government” did.

But the tendency to view America’s three-tiered system as one isn’t my mother’s fault. That message comes through in much of the commentary we read about issues and how to solve them. The writers who have the leisure to think about issues and propose what should be done about them are mostly congregated in Washington, and are mostly focused on national government. The more specialized the experts get, more likely they are to overlook state and local initiatives.

Take this article by Ryan Cooper, talking about the desirability of national legislation for infrastructure.

John McCain's famous crusade against earmarks was classic austerity politics — trying to demonstrate his moral virtue through a crusade against government spending, which was assumed to be wasteful by definition. By this view, whether some community needs infrastructure is typically defined with reference to what can be used immediately — crowded trains need more cars, full airports need to be expanded, and so on. It would thus be easy to "prove" that Detroit does not need a big investment in, say, public transit, because its population has been declining for 70 years.
In reality, this is backwards. Detroit's population has crashed because it has been starved of investment, and because it ended up on the wrong side of neoliberal trade deals that cored out its industrial base. We want infrastructure to be used, of course, be we also want it to tie the United States together as a functioning polity (again, so long as we are paying reasonable prices).

Cooper doesn’t, for a moment, consider that states and local communities ought to be free to build the infrastructure they want. He views Detroit’s infrastructure needs and Cincinnati’s infrastructure needs in terms of national policy.

Cooper argues that America’s infrastructure ought to be a national issue, and that bloated national spending bills are the way to get the job done.

That’s not altogether wrong. Because of policies imposed by Washington, state and local governments can’t raise the money they need to pay for their own roads and bridges and internet access and sewage systems. Washington takes the money first and gets it out of circulation before the states can get it.

So, one more things that needs to be adjusted in America’s economic and governmental system is the balance of the national, state and local governments.