There are very few good things one can say about Richard Nixon’s monstrous creation, the inaptly labeled “Environmental Protection Agency”. Since given bureaucratic life in 1970, it’s continuing line of edicts and fines have shut down businesses, prevented others from starting, and seen people kill endangered animals rather than have government officials discover them and make their land worthless.

At the end of the twentieth century, academics and policymakers welcomed a trend toward fiscal and political decentralization as part of a potential solution for slow economic growth and poor performance by insulated, unaccountable governments. For the past two decades, researchers have been trying to answer a series of vexing questions about the political economy of multilayered governance.

Disarray in Washington has a silver lining: state and local governments reclaiming their essential role in American democracy. 

History shows that special counsels almost inevitably overstep their mandates.