Every federal system fights forever over which level of government owns which issue — and the fight is rigged, because power aggregates upward by default. Whoever runs the center finds reasons why this year's crisis requires central authority, and the authority never goes home when the crisis does. This design refuses to referee that fight case by case. Instead it makes subsidiarity — the principle that an issue belongs at the smallest scale that can actually handle it — a measured quantity rather than a slogan: the scale of an issue is discovered by the mechanism — and the discovery process is deliberately tilted downhill.
An issue that consistently fails to draw engagement at a scale — across multiple cycles, never one — drops to the level below, taking its budget share with it. Sustained national indifference is not a problem to overcome with awareness campaigns; it is information. It reveals the issue was never national. And failure demotes too: a policy that keeps failing its confirmation reviews loses jurisdiction downward rather than winning a bigger budget — inverting the oldest trick in bureaucratic self-preservation, where every failure is reframed as underfunding and incompetence becomes the growth strategy. Jurisdiction is the rent; competence is the only currency that pays it. Portfolio and tax share demote together, or the mechanism is just an unfunded-mandate generator.
Notice what this does to intense minorities: nothing their engagement can't honestly buy. A passionate faction cannot clear a national engagement floor alone — what their intensity buys is jurisdiction at their own scale, where their rules bind only themselves. Self-governance, not dominion over the indifferent.
Centralization is never ambient. Moving an issue up-scale — including neighbors subsuming a genuinely harmful local regime — requires fresh affirmative consent from the base layer — the citizens of the scale that would absorb the issue — costless to oppose so that no one is ever priced out of resisting centralization, and hard to pass by design. And it requires evidence, against a bright line: demonstrated cross-border spillover, not disapproval. Harm contained inside a boundary is their experiment to run and your border to walk away from; harm that crosses the boundary is jurisdiction. This is Mill's harm principle — the Victorian liberal's rule that only harm to others licenses coercion — repurposed as a routing rule — chosen with full memory of how its absence played out, when "national concern" was elastic enough to crush decades of state-level drug-policy experimentation. The spillover test must be adjudicable, and false claims cost the claimants their points.
The externality test runs both directions. Some issues have footprints that objectively exceed any local boundary while attracting chronically low attention — carbon, aquifers, antibiotic resistance. These cannot demote on apathy; indifference to a shared aquifer does not localize the aquifer. And a short, explicitly enumerated class of portfolios is demotion-proof outright because physics makes them indivisible — defense, currency, pandemic response. For those, failure's only sanction is personnel: pay stops, incumbents fall at the gates. The list must stay short and enumerated precisely because every centralizer will lobby to be on it.
Put the two directions together and you get this design's constitutional thesis, stated as a prediction: under low civic energy, this system does not seize into vetocracy, gridlock where everyone can block and no one can act, and does not slide into strongman demand — it decomposes toward smaller scales. Disengagement doesn't hand power to whoever shows up at the center; it drains the center. Apathy buys smallness, not tyranny. Every other governance design we know of fails that stress test.