COLUMN LEFT : Congress: a Job Without a Future : The shift of federal roles and spending to the states cuts prospects for political careerists.

Even the recent series of scandals involving perks enjoyed by members of Congress cannot explain why the seasonal trickle of retirements has turned into a flood.

Most of those leaving are not being run out of town on a rail, as those chronicling the anti-politician mood of the country would have us believe. Rather, they are leaving out of a pervasive sense that they cannot make a difference in a system that no longer works. As Rep. Dennis E. Eckart (D-Ohio), one of the youngest (age 42) and one of the earliest to leave, said on ABC news: “Maybe 125 new members can make a difference. But somehow that sounds to me like if you scramble eggs the cholesterol will disappear.”

The most simple explanation for the current malaise and stasis on Capitol Hill is divided government. George Bush would have you believe that a Republican Congress would make Washington work again; Bill Clinton would have you believe that a Democratic President would make it all work again. And there is, no doubt, some truth in both statements.

But even a Congress and a President of the same party would still leave open the question: What should Washington do? And herein lies the crux of the problem. The crisis in Washington is, at bottom, about the changing role of the federal government, and the dimensions of that change are only recently apparent and infrequently articulated.

Thanks in part to large budget deficits, members of Congress can no longer arrive in town with the expectation that they will create new Cabinet departments, new agencies or even new programs as a permanent legacy of their careers. But what began with Republican rule and persistent money problems is now part of a larger trend in late-20th-Century society.

This trend, variously called devolution, demassification, subsidiarity (taken from Catholic social thought) or new federalism, is rooted in the reaction against centralized, bureaucratic command and control structures that have been undermined all over the world by the information age.

This shift toward smaller, leaner government mirrors a similar trend in the economic world. Joel Kotkin, an economist with the Center for the New West, points out that smaller companies that are quick to innovate and to adapt to international competition have consistently been out performing older giants like IBM and General Motors. And students of government from David Osborne to Ann Bowman and Richard Kearney have identified states and localities--not the Feds--as the new centers of dynamic, innovative government.

Because of these trends, it is unlikely that even a new Democratic President and a new Democratic Congress would restore Washington to the glory days of the New Deal or the Great Society. But there is an alternative to stasis and the resulting desultory mood on Capital Hill.

Alice Rivlin, the first congressional budget director, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has identified the outlines of a 21st-Century government, the first critical step toward remaking what used to be a fairly broad public consensus on the role of Washington. Under the decidedly unsexy term New Federalism, Rivlin calls for devolution to the states of federal spending for education, housing, training and most other types of investment. To fund these activities, she proposes a new approach to state taxation called “uniform shared taxes,” in which the federal government would move toward greater uniformity in business and consumption taxation by collecting these taxes and distributing them directly to the states.

The crux of this new thinking about the federal government is, as Rivlin points out, a clear distinction between activities that are non-national and those that are national. Service delivery programs clearly fall into the former category, in that they demand flexibility and innovation. The federal role is secondary; it can grant waivers, as George Bush did in the case of Wisconsin’s welfare-reform plan, or as Bill Clinton said he would in the case of New Jersey’s welfare-reform plan, or it can untie the knots in federal funding that have acted, quite unintentionally, to limit local innovation, as Rep. Thomas J. Downey (D-New York) has done with passage of The Family Preservation Act of 1991.

But in a world where the question is still “What did you do in Washington?” rather than “What did you undo?” politicians are likely to feel unproductive and leave. Maybe it’s time to change the question.