What is one downside of federalism?

The biggest downside to federalism, in the American context, is the lack of true national policies.

Education is a great example of this. Under America's system, education policy is largely (some exceptions) reserved to the States.

As a result, each State has a different set of expectations, rules, curriculums, and procedures for education.

This makes it difficult to create and maintain a unifying national curriculum that reflects the common needs and interests of such a large nation.

This is true for many other areas of law and policy. Federalism allows states to be "laboratories of Democracy" but federalism allows the laboratories to stay large silo'd off from one another.

One down side of federalism was state government can not Determine to run things as well