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Next week America celebrates its semiquincentennial, which is a mouthful of syllables meaning the 250th anniversary of our founding.
It’s a milestone worthy of exceptional celebration, and spending and travel projections suggest the nation’s birthday party will rise to the occasion.
But the two-and-a-half century mark is also a moment to measure more than just longevity. Independence from England in 1776 signified the start of a national existence, but it would be a few years later before the constitutional government was established that is still in place today.
The government is not the nation, however. Citizens are the nation. The government is a system instituted to form a more perfect union in which We the People enjoy our unalienable rights.
Our major national commemorations are observed every 50 years, so it’s a good time to compare the past two eras: 1926-1976 and 1976-2026. The population and government both grew substantially in each period. Does more government automatically equate to more progress? Let’s take a look.
The first 50-year era was one of extraordinary accomplishment. The nation saw dramatic increases in life expectancy and educational attainment. Home electrification and indoor plumbing became universal. Medical advancements delivered victories against deadly infectious diseases. The interstate highway system was built. Air travel became routine, supported by massive airport construction.
It was a particularly golden era of efficiency for public schools: enrollment grew by 80 percent (almost 20 million students), the number of school districts decreased by 88 percent, and 1.4 million extra teacher positions were created.
Taxpayers spent more and got more. Even with New Deal programs and wartime deficit spending, the federal government was still relatively limited and operated mostly within its historic means. The national debt in bicentennial 1976 was 33 percent of gross domestic product, approximately where it had been in centennial 1876.
The second 50-year era brought unprecedented and explosive federal expansion in several areas that had experienced improvement leading up to 1976: a Cabinet-level Department of Education (with extensive oversight and mandates), skyrocketing health-care spending through Medicare/Medicaid, college funding (Pell grants, student loans) and more active regulation from enormous growth at the FDA.
The actual numbers are eye-popping. Between 1976 and 2026, public education enrollment has grown by only 6 percent. But the number of classroom teachers increased by 58 percent and the number of non-teaching staff ballooned by 157 percent (the bulk of which provide non-academic services).
In essence, since the bicentennial public schools have added a million teachers and more than two million support staff to teach an extra three million students.
The Department of Education’s budget increased roughly fivefold during that period (after inflation). Per-pupil spending has more than doubled.
Has student achievement kept pace with those spending increases? NAEP reading scores for 9-year-olds increased 3 percent in the last 50 years; math scores improved by 7 percent. That is progress, but it’s not even close to proportional.
The question of whether we’re getting our money’s worth gets even harder looking at other areas where federal involvement has grown exponentially.
Economist Milton Friedman is credited for quipping, “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.”
Nothing proves that point better than higher education, where student debt is now about $1.7 trillion, and tuition costs have far outpaced inflation. The federal government’s attempt to make college more affordable has only resulted in making it dramatically less so.
The average student can’t afford it today without taking out huge loans.
In 1976, federal funding accounted for one out of every five health-care dollars and totaled $31 billion. In 2026, it’s closing in on $2 trillion fast and now represents half of all health-care expenditures. And yet adult obesity rates have tripled, as has the incidence of Type 2 diabetes.
The FDA’s budget is 30 times larger now than in 1976, and yet with a vastly expanded nutrition regulation footprint, more than half the calories Americans consume come from ultra-processed foods.
To top it all off, the federal government keeps borrowing money to finance out-of-control growth. The national debt is 10 times larger now than in 1976 (in adjusted dollars) and at 120 percent of GDP is four times more than the bicentennial ratio.
Imagine a graph for the two eras. In the first 50 years, the government growth arrow went up, and so did national outcomes. Investment with proportional returns is good government.
But in the last 50 years, the government growth arrow shot way up, while national outcomes in some of the same domains flattened out. Skyrocketing, unaccountable spending without improvement (or when things get worse) is government failure.
The federal government since the bicentennial has consumed more money, developed more programs, produced more regulations and accumulated more bureaucracy.
When results and outcomes in some of the largest federal growth areas aren’t proportional, it’s time for less.
It’s wrong to say the federal government always makes things worse. It does some things quite well.
The lesson is that federal spending doesn’t always make things better. Maybe by the tricentennial we’ll have figured that out.
Dana D. Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.
