(Bloomberg Opinion) -- One of the weirdest things in this weird historical moment is the hodgepodge nature of the coronavirus responses from different state, county, and local governments throughout the United States. In essentially every other country on earth, central government authorities are directing and running the response to Covid-19.

If Italy shuts down, it’s the Italian government that decides to do it. If Germany chooses to end hotel stays, it’s Chancellor Angela Merkel who makes the call. But in the U.S., separate Bay Area counties can go one way, the mayor of New York another, and the governor of Massachusetts yet a third. There’s little if any national coordination.

It hardly seems like an optimal arrangement during a global pandemic.

The explanation for this bizarre diversity of uncoordinated responses can’t be laid solely at the feet of President Donald Trump, despite his alarming lack of leadership. The deeper explanation is the distinctive, peculiar system of U.S. federalism. We have a national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a Federal Emergency Management Agency. But they don’t exercise direct supervisory authority over state, county or local boards of health — just as Trump has no supervisory authority over state, county or local executives.

Most of the time, the pervasively federal nature of how government power is deployed in the U.S. goes unnoticed, simply because it seems so normal to Americans. We take it for granted that schools, say, don’t fall into a national bureaucracy and aren’t under a single national set of standards. We accept that police forces are uncoordinated and that they don’t work for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

When we do notice federalism, we tend to accept its inefficiencies because of the desirable democratic benefit we think it provides: We get better self-government, we think, when decisions are made nearer to home, not far off in Washington, D.C.

The unique conditions of a pandemic call that tradeoff of inefficiency-for-democracy into question. The virus isn’t local. It’s global. It doesn’t respect state of national borders, no matter that many national governments are trying to close their borders to keep it out.

When it comes to strategies for containment, non-coordination seems not charmingly democratic but worrisome. If some states or cities are too slow to control the virus, that will affect all the others — because the virus will gain steam and eventually spread even to the places that have imposed controls.

Weak pandemic control is the ultimate example of what economists call a negative externality, a spillover effect that harms others, not just those who are acting (or failing to act) themselves.

In a perfect world, the ideal answer to these federalism-based coordination problems would be for the federal government to preempt state actors and agencies and command and control a national response. Federal law allows for roughly that approach. Technically, states would have to agree to put their officials under federal direction; states can’t be “commandeered” without their consent. But presumably in a time of emergency, most states would fall into line.

That isn’t happening. The federal response so far has been haphazard and inadequate. We would be much better off with strong leadership, informed by public health science and policy, but we don’t have that right now.

Yet here the silver lining of federalism provides some illumination amidst the looming clouds of national crisis.

Given that the Trump administration hasn’t yet coordinated a strong, science-based national direction, at least states and localities remain free to do their best — which may, in many cases, be better than what this administration can offer. Many urban centers have great academic hospitals and sophisticated public health policy authorities. Mayors and governors can draw on those resources and implement policy approaches that make sense.

In turn, smart local policies can be copied by other local and state governments. Instead of an under-protective race to the bottom, the crisis could trigger a race toward the top, with states and localities vying to make their citizens safe.

To be clear, I’m not advocating for non-coordination. I still hope the Trump administration can get ahead of the public health challenges here, because that could save lives.

Rather, the point is that when the federal government seems to be falling down on the job, we can take some solace when state and local governments step up.

Imagine how disastrous it would be if the whole national public health response system depended on presidential leadership — and then that leadership failed. At least federalism creates room for state and local governments to act on their own.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and host of the podcast “Deep Background.” He is a professor of law at Harvard University and was a clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter. His books include “The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President.”

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