My middle son lived in Manhattan for ten years before relocating to Amsterdam, and during his tenure in the Big Apple he sprinkled numerous conversations with complaints (okay, rants) about the excessive costs of the city’s infrastructure. He couldn’t understand why other countries could extend their subway systems and railways at a fraction of America’s cost, and could complete projects far more rapidly. He loved New York, but the glaring and costly inefficiency offended him.
I had no wisdom to impart. I didn’t know–and was unable to speculate– why a subway extension in the U.S. cost so much more–and took so much longer– than similar projects in other countries.
Until very recently, I was equally unaware of the policy war centered on something called the abundance agenda, which turned out–despite what I still consider a weird label–to be an argument over that same question: why can’t America build things anymore?
As an article from The Atlantic explained:
The abundance agenda is a collection of policy reforms designed to make it easier to build housing and infrastructure and for government bureaucracy to work. Despite its cheerful name and earnest intention to find win-win solutions, the abundance agenda contains a radical critique of the past half century of American government. On top of that—and this is what has set off clanging alarms on the left—it is a direct attack on the constellation of activist organizations, often called “the groups,” that control progressive politics and have significant influence over the Democratic Party.
The article documented national examples that dovetailed with my son’s complaints. For example, the amount of time that elapsed between Biden’s signing of his infrastructure bill and actual construction meant that voters hadn’t seen the effects of that legislation by the next election.
A massive law had been enacted, yet Americans did not notice any difference, because indeed, very little had changed. Biden had anticipated, after quickly signing his infrastructure bill and then two more big laws pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into manufacturing and energy, that he would spend the rest of his presidency cutting ribbons at gleaming new bridges and plants. But only a fraction of the funds Biden had authorized were spent before he began his reelection campaign, and of those, hardly any yielded concrete results.
Only 58 of the “nationwide” electric-vehicle-charging stations were in service; completion dates for most road projects was mid-2027. Rural broadband access to had connected zero customers.
Policy wonks began to ask the same questions my son had asked. What was going on? American government used to construct engineering miracles like the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge ahead of schedule and under budget– Medicare had become available less than a year after it passed, but the Affordable Care Act’s exchange took nearly four years. And an embarrassing question: Why was everything slower, more expensive, and more dysfunctional in states and cities controlled by Democrats?
The policy wonks concluded that, over the years, a web of laws and regulations has turned any attempt to build public infrastructure into an expensive, agonizing nightmare. But removing excess regulations is highly controversial, because the limitations on building and government were largely imposed by interest groups that believed them necessary– interest groups that have dominated the Democratic Party for the last half century, and who saw their task as preventing an alliance of government, Big Business and Big Labor from subordinating the needs of citizens. They wanted to prevent the government from doing harm– but too often, they ended up preventing it from doing anything at all.
The National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, is an example. Passed in 1969, the law required the government to undertake environmental-impact studies before authorizing major projects and created elaborate legal hurdles to navigate.
Activist groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund saw NEPA as a potent tool to stop Washington (and, through state-level copycat laws, state and local governments) from building harmful projects. They pursued an energetic legal strategy to expand the law’s reach, turning it into a suffocating weapon against development. Over time, the environmental-impact statements required to start a project have ballooned from about 10 pages to hundreds; the process now takes more than four years on average to complete.
The article has many more examples, but the issue is so contentious because it isn’t “either/or”–it requires policymakers to find the mean between extremes. How much regulation is needed to safeguard the environment, or protect against government overreach–and how much is too much?
If and when we elect lawmakers who actually care about governing, it’s an issue they need to address.
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