Even amongst the chaos of the moment, the left must grapple with the challenge Marc Dunkelman describes in his important new book. In fact, because of it.
I really wish California could figure out our "nothing works" problems. High speed rail, is that ever going to happen? The cost of housing in San Francisco, is it just going to become a city with rich people and homeless people and nothing in between? Wildfires, is it going to become impossible to get home insurance?
The Republicans here in California, well, they just have no power at the state level. We don't have to make that sort of political compromise. If the Democratic Party has a plan for how to make things work, here in California we should just be able to fully enact it. And we should have plenty of money to spend on things because our economy has so many strong sectors.
California should be a beacon proving to the rest of the country that we know the right way to do things, not a symbol of dysfunction.
I think in CA HSR case there's a legitimate stronger case for outright fraud that should be levied at many of these "community" organizations. Tens of billions to produce what? If not rail then an audit should be clear about what the groups were promising and what they were delivering.
Please keep this conversation going. Because genuine progress on outcomes is so difficult, way too many people settle for rallying around “righteous positions” that might feel good in the moment but can impede the very outcomes they are hoping for.
I hate to say it because I love the book so much, but some blame lies with Robert Caro's The Power Broker. It exposed the world to the nasty side of Robert Moses's building spree and we overcorrected, determined not to displace or displease anyone. The book rightfully showed us the human cost of unchecked power, but its cultural impact has contributed to a paralysis where even worthy projects benefiting the many can be endlessly delayed by the concerns of the few. The pendulum has swung too far from Moses's bulldozer approach to a vetocracy where critical projects languish for decades. Is it possible to find a middle ground where we can build necessary infrastructure with compassion and fair compensation, not permanent gridlock disguised as process?
I agree that the book is a problem (I didn’t love it, though; I wish Caro had let readers judge for themselves rather than bludgeoning us with his thesis, and a stronger edit would have been helpful). My field, urban planning, is still, to a surprising extent, dominated by the “Moses/Jacobs” rubric.
The problem with Moses was not who suffered: it's that the cost-benefit analysis was wrong and freeways should never have been built. Passenger rail is a much better solution to the problem, as the decades before cars proved possible.
From the trenches.. you have hit the nail on the head. CEQ folks seem to believe that disagreements would go away if agencies would only do public involvement correctly and analyze to the specificity required by random judges. The reality is that people disagree and often can't come to agreement, so someone's going to have to decide and take the heat.
I spent most of my working career in the biopharma industry and am no stranger to the difficulties in getting things done via regulation. We started what seemed to be a simple project of migrating all the prescription drug labels to the Internet and removing the regulatory requirement that a printed copy accompany each package/bottle as it leaves the filling line at the company. We did an RFP to show that this in fact could work and did a pilot project in a handful of pharmacies in the mid-Atlantic region. The pharmacists all liked the approach and we worked with FDA on this project from its inception. Many of those who worked on this project as well as myself had retired by the time the FDA finally changed the regulation (though it became optional, many companies were still providing the leaflets in packages). We were able to push for a website at the National Library of Medicine that has the most current prescribing information: https://dailymed.nlm.nih.gov/dailymed/index.cfm
Now this was as noted a rather simple project, yet about 16 years from inception to regulation change. I could write about a bunch of other interesting stories on other projects.
As an aside, I was also tangentially involved in the "Reinventing Government" initiative that Vice President Gore directed (our trade association was requested to submit suggested changes in regulation with documentation as to why they ought to be changed). This remains probably the most effective modernization in terms of reduction of Federal employees and reduced regulatory burden on a number of industries. It was hard work but thoughtful. There was no maniac running around with a chainsaw.
I just wonder how much can be changed if there isn't a major shift in rights to sue over these decisions. Perhaps you could require bonds be put up for the government/developer's cost of litigation to dissuade more frivolous lawsuits, but fundamentally it's the cost and time-suck of litigation that makes so much of our government work poorly. I think it's very difficult to remove those kinds of rights, even though we desperately need it.
The way I've had some success talking about my honest feelings about the cuts without sounding churlish is to couch language in empathy. I think massive, painful, and widespread cuts to federal employment are needed AND that it's being done in the most foolish, cruel, and ineffective way. I also think the government should not be a jobs program for its own sake AND that a significant number of peoples lives will be much worse off for not having that employment. I feel that you're doing that in my mind if that counts for anything. The more we point out that trade-offs exist AND we can tackle those trade-offs via mitigations rather than avoiding the trade-off at all, the more we can get back to thinking productively.
I do not think it is possible to know if federal employment is too large or too small without analyzing activity by activity. Does THIS function produce more benefit than cost? Could the net benefit be greater if modified employing fewer people?
Per capita federal employment has remained steady the past 40 years, so I don't see the argument that the U.S. harbors some massive jobs program a la some European countries that distorts the labor market. But it also varies widely by agency . . .DoD has had just MASSIVE amounts of money lobbed at it for decades, with lawmakers completely unwilling to demand accountability for the trillions of dollers allotted over time. What has transpired is a complex web of contractor/sub-contractor/fed employee silos.
Other agencies have been under-funded for years, like the Forest Service, and have relatively little fat to trim.
As a conceptual framework for regulation shouldn't the agency put forward its cost benefit analysis that yields a given decision and then invite comments on the analysis. In the example given why group X thinks that the cost the agency assumed for environmental damage to the Maine woods was too low or the fossil fuel companies think the damage assigned to CO2 emissions was too high and what the correct values should be. The agency then modifies the analysis (or does not) and goes forward (or not), possibly with a modified decision based on an analysis incorporating in the information from commentators. If commentators still think the cost benefit analysis is wrong, they sue.
Yes, but… The problem is if you disagree with the outcome, often the best way to defeat or delay implementation is to attack the analysis. I spent a career doing cost-benefit analysis, and the fact is the real world is messy and perfect data does not exist. There is ALWAYS more analysis that could be done to refine an assessment, and there are always assumptions and estimates that have to be made to complete an analysis of a real world problem. Delay is often victory for those opposing a regulation.
Which brings us back to: who has the money and power? They are the ones that will win, over and over. When they own the system...do we actually have a democracy?
This is a thoughtful critique of systemic dysfunction, but as a government efficiency expert, your focus should be on the crisis unfolding right now. DOGE isn’t just another example of inefficiency—it’s outright lawlessness, trampling competition and enabling the richest man in the world to hijack public institutions for personal gain. The USAID shutdown isn’t a distant policy failure; it’s killing people in real time. What we need most from you in this moment isn’t a broad discussion of dysfunction, but a clear, forceful stand against DOGE—explaining why it’s illegal, why it’s dangerous, and why it must be stopped.
What to me is missing is at least a few samples of where in the world it is done better. No, I don't mean Chinese Communist Party Agenda. Do the Danes or Finns or Spaniards get transmission lines built through rural small towns? I'd have a lot more hope & faith with a couple of current free-world examples of a process that works instead of all hand-wavey "reform" ideas.
U.S. subway construction costs are often 4-5 times higher than those in peer countries. For example, New York City subway extensions cost around $1.5-2.5 billion per kilometer, while similar projects in Paris, Madrid, or Seoul might cost $250-500 million per kilometer.
In the United States it costs roughly $609 million to build a kilometer of rail. In Canada it costs only $295 million and in Portugal, $96 million.
Sweden adopted the building code changes we were supposed to:
This is a staggering indictment of our health as a democracy. Too many cooks in the kitchen, so unfortunately we cannot have nice things to eat.
Only thing worse would be actual "crooks" in the kitchen...hope that never happens...it can't happen here! It would never happen here. Ever...
On a personal note: my nephew is now a coder in Stockholm, which he loves. He can ride his bike all over the place. You don't need a car. His partner there trained as a nurse, didn't like the actual job, retrained as a lawyer, likes that. All because: Sweden! You could never do that here. We don't get options like that. Because we are Free!
She came here to visit, and described her big big rental SUV as "Ready for the Apocalypse!" And it wasn't even a Cybertruck, aka the Armored Personnel Carrier. That one would be ready for Day of the Locusts.
Swedes don't fear job loss like we do...oh, I could go on and on. They are not as materialistic, don't rush their kids to grow up so fast...but they can't deal with immigrants, either, sadly. And that Russian bear...
We are so screwed up here. My friends in Canada think we are a bunch of cowboys. And boy are they mad at the US now. Wayne Gretzky (!) is the new Charles Lindbergh, a turncoat. Amazing!
Maybe there is a Chaos Agent or two at work somewhere?
I will shortly be taking the NYC subway system, should I ask for people to pray for me?
The real answer is industry, and the lessons that pub sec could take from industry in process now well exceed simple tech solutions. More than a few companies are bigger than dozens of nation states these days, but the idea that public sector has anything to learn from them on process is sneered at
I worked in financial and economic analysis in both the private sector and for the federal government. One difference I found is that at my company, when we had to do an analysis to make a decision, we scaled the depth of the analysis to the importance of the decision and the time frame when we needed the answer. We’d analyze, present the findings, make a decision, and move on. Once a decision was made, the alternatives were no longer an option in play. If we needed to adapt, we’d go forward from where we were.
In the government, every analysis had to be documented to the fifth decimal point and subjected to literally decades of second guessing, often in front of Congress. There was one hearing where my project manager was subjected to grilling about why there were cost overruns compared to a project baseline that had been published BEFORE HE WAS BORN.
Sounds like the problem here is with Congress, not the government department that has to answer to it. Was this project in the Defense Department, by any chance?
Am asking because I am sure you know how President (and retired General) Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, warned us about the "military-industrial complex," i.e. the defense industry, which he knew so well, and its mercenary motives? And the revolving door between the military and it? And how the voters wanted Federal money spent in their districts? Especially voters in Red states?
The tail, "government," often gets blamed instead of the dogs that wag it, who should.
Follow the money. My own little state (guess which it is) gets its money from: the hedge fund industry, the insurance industry, defense contractors, and Native American casinos. Our cities (which do not include Boston, hint), which used to employ a lot of people in factories, are all broke.
Speaking of efficiency: hello, American Health Care Industry? Priciest in the world by a wide margin. Finding creative ways, like a good corporate bureaucrat, to drive prices up for everything. How much can we mark this thing up? Ten times? Go for it.
Elon, why not tell the billionaire Vivek to drop the price of his drugs by half, or the government won't pay for it? No? Oh, right: when you are a celebrity, they 'let" you do it (aka "get away with it.")
And when you have political power, you can turn that into dollar$. Highly efficient way to get money. Easier than running a restaurant, where you have to actually feed people. But that's playing by the normal peoples' rules, not the airified rules of our Rulers.
BTW, when I was covering our Town Council for my local newspaper back in the day, I had the pleasure of listening as the attorneys on the council spent an hour trying to define the word "dust." They were just trying to keep dump trucks from spilling s--t all over the town roads. But how do you put these desires into words? Hmmm. Governing is hard, even for grownups with JD degrees.
Today's thought: shouldn't our decision makers be held accountable for their actions? Such as:
This is a great point; bureacrats aren't the ones by and large creating these burdensome processes and procedures . . they're following what Congress instructed them to do!
Environmentalists are often the bogeyman in these discussions, and the positions they defend are sometimes unwise. But the environmental movement has learned its lessons and is now very effective at doing precisely the kind of slow, deliberate, careful coalition-building that you criticize, with the result that they have had some major wins like the "once in a generation" 2019 public lands bill that was supported by Mitch McConnell and signed into law by President Trump. Who would have thought that Republicans would create 1.3 million acres of new wilderness, add 3 national park units and expand 8 others? But the bill passed the Senate 92 to 8.
Such work is slow -- negotiations took hundreds of participants several years -- and not well suited to the kind of infrastructure projects that you write about. Sometimes, as in your transmission line example, there are going to be losers, no matter what. But progress was undeniably made. Congress did their jobs and hammered out a compromise that balanced competing interests, and once the decision was reached, implementation was simple.
So, how do you enable implementation to be driven through to completion once Congress has spoken, while allowing some -- but not too many -- avenues of legal recourse to correct bad decisions? You suggest limiting public input, but I think there's a difference between limiting public input *during* the implementation stage, and limiting public participation in general. I would agree that the former is necessary to a functioning country, but the latter seems undemocratic, undesirable, and likely to generate decisions that get more pushback later on.
The environmental lobby also has some widely diverse cohorts . . .groups like the Nature Conservancy, Wildlife Conservation Society, and WWF have become much more pragmatic in juggling different constituencies and finding compromise, whereas Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth are still stuck in the 1970s mindset of "block all development".
“You see: It is difficult to write about topics where multiple angles are all, simultaneously, partially true, and where it is easy to get attacked for saying things that different groups may perceive as bad. The Western mind has been trained in reductive, dualistic, binary thinking which no longer serves us when issues are complex and bleed into each other in many intricate ways.”—Daniel pinchbeck, on a totally different topic. But I think having these hard conversations, however imperfectly, is the only way forward
One of the things we should think hard about is allowing mistakes to be made but then requiring just compensation. One of the biggest tragedies in the mid-century era of ramming freeways through our cities is that people who were displaced were not paid a fair price for their properties, and the devaluation for nearby properties that weren’t taken wasn’t compensated at all. But we can imagine an alternative where all taken properties were paid for 120% of value, and the devaluation of nearby properties was also paid for. This would have effectively prevented almost all freeways from being built through dense areas, because it would have been way too expensive, but it would have allowed some small, high value projects to go ahead.
Conversely in rural areas where land is cheap and new infrastructure can actually adds value, projects would be fairly feasible.
But the last thing is, so much of this is just aesthetics. People just don’t like seeing things change. And we have to get over that as a society and stop letting aesthetic preferences carry the force of law.
John Ralston Saul's book "Voltaire's Bastards" covers similar themes. Not fixing a problem (road widening) tends to deliver future earnings (one more lane, income generated & 'congestion' unfixed awaiting the next milking). A lot of consultation is set out like a parent asking kids whether they want brussell sprouts with dinner or ice cream...fated to invoke a short term sugar fix tragedy of the commons. I don't know what the right balance is but checked and balanced competent authorities making decisions in a timely manner in the public interest sounds pretty close to me. It doesn't mean everyone gets a prize or ice cream for dinner but hopefully a healthier, wealthier, robust and resilient future. Considered parenting not 'daddy' blindly tearing down Chesterton fences.
The democrats have a deep democracy problem of their own. Until they admit how undemocratic and dishonest the presidential campaign of Joe Biden then Kamala Harris was I don't know how anybody could trust them. They are hypocrites to clutch their pearls about the Republicans destorying democracy with their actions of a wholly undemocratic candidate choice process for 2024/25.
Action plan: 1. Joe Biden and everyone involved in pretending he was fit to run apologize to the American people for the bully lie that Biden was fit to run. 2. Run a really democrat primary....fairly districbute money for elections, use rank choice voting, allow anyone on the ticket and remove the barriers, outline the ways they will change their behavior to be more democratic themselves, run much younger candidates (diversity in government needs to include ages of people serving too...not just gender, race, etc)...plus many other ways smarter people than me have outlined. Actions speak louder than words....especially when the words are lies.
I really wish California could figure out our "nothing works" problems. High speed rail, is that ever going to happen? The cost of housing in San Francisco, is it just going to become a city with rich people and homeless people and nothing in between? Wildfires, is it going to become impossible to get home insurance?
The Republicans here in California, well, they just have no power at the state level. We don't have to make that sort of political compromise. If the Democratic Party has a plan for how to make things work, here in California we should just be able to fully enact it. And we should have plenty of money to spend on things because our economy has so many strong sectors.
California should be a beacon proving to the rest of the country that we know the right way to do things, not a symbol of dysfunction.
Couldn't agree more.
I think in CA HSR case there's a legitimate stronger case for outright fraud that should be levied at many of these "community" organizations. Tens of billions to produce what? If not rail then an audit should be clear about what the groups were promising and what they were delivering.
Yes, of democrats want to be trusted with power.They should prove themselves in blue states like california and illinois
Please keep this conversation going. Because genuine progress on outcomes is so difficult, way too many people settle for rallying around “righteous positions” that might feel good in the moment but can impede the very outcomes they are hoping for.
There is so much of this going on. Many people taking positions that “sound good” but actually serve to undermine the very same cause.
I hate to say it because I love the book so much, but some blame lies with Robert Caro's The Power Broker. It exposed the world to the nasty side of Robert Moses's building spree and we overcorrected, determined not to displace or displease anyone. The book rightfully showed us the human cost of unchecked power, but its cultural impact has contributed to a paralysis where even worthy projects benefiting the many can be endlessly delayed by the concerns of the few. The pendulum has swung too far from Moses's bulldozer approach to a vetocracy where critical projects languish for decades. Is it possible to find a middle ground where we can build necessary infrastructure with compassion and fair compensation, not permanent gridlock disguised as process?
Agree. Love the book. And yes.
cost-benefit analysis is neither a bulldozer (cost = zero) or vetocracy (cost=infinity).
I agree that the book is a problem (I didn’t love it, though; I wish Caro had let readers judge for themselves rather than bludgeoning us with his thesis, and a stronger edit would have been helpful). My field, urban planning, is still, to a surprising extent, dominated by the “Moses/Jacobs” rubric.
The problem with Moses was not who suffered: it's that the cost-benefit analysis was wrong and freeways should never have been built. Passenger rail is a much better solution to the problem, as the decades before cars proved possible.
From the trenches.. you have hit the nail on the head. CEQ folks seem to believe that disagreements would go away if agencies would only do public involvement correctly and analyze to the specificity required by random judges. The reality is that people disagree and often can't come to agreement, so someone's going to have to decide and take the heat.
And then that someone should be held accountable executive branch and or voters
I spent most of my working career in the biopharma industry and am no stranger to the difficulties in getting things done via regulation. We started what seemed to be a simple project of migrating all the prescription drug labels to the Internet and removing the regulatory requirement that a printed copy accompany each package/bottle as it leaves the filling line at the company. We did an RFP to show that this in fact could work and did a pilot project in a handful of pharmacies in the mid-Atlantic region. The pharmacists all liked the approach and we worked with FDA on this project from its inception. Many of those who worked on this project as well as myself had retired by the time the FDA finally changed the regulation (though it became optional, many companies were still providing the leaflets in packages). We were able to push for a website at the National Library of Medicine that has the most current prescribing information: https://dailymed.nlm.nih.gov/dailymed/index.cfm
Now this was as noted a rather simple project, yet about 16 years from inception to regulation change. I could write about a bunch of other interesting stories on other projects.
As an aside, I was also tangentially involved in the "Reinventing Government" initiative that Vice President Gore directed (our trade association was requested to submit suggested changes in regulation with documentation as to why they ought to be changed). This remains probably the most effective modernization in terms of reduction of Federal employees and reduced regulatory burden on a number of industries. It was hard work but thoughtful. There was no maniac running around with a chainsaw.
On point as usual Jen. Vetocracy is strangling this country.
Agreed..the vetocracy is alive and well in the states.
I just wonder how much can be changed if there isn't a major shift in rights to sue over these decisions. Perhaps you could require bonds be put up for the government/developer's cost of litigation to dissuade more frivolous lawsuits, but fundamentally it's the cost and time-suck of litigation that makes so much of our government work poorly. I think it's very difficult to remove those kinds of rights, even though we desperately need it.
The way I've had some success talking about my honest feelings about the cuts without sounding churlish is to couch language in empathy. I think massive, painful, and widespread cuts to federal employment are needed AND that it's being done in the most foolish, cruel, and ineffective way. I also think the government should not be a jobs program for its own sake AND that a significant number of peoples lives will be much worse off for not having that employment. I feel that you're doing that in my mind if that counts for anything. The more we point out that trade-offs exist AND we can tackle those trade-offs via mitigations rather than avoiding the trade-off at all, the more we can get back to thinking productively.
I do not think it is possible to know if federal employment is too large or too small without analyzing activity by activity. Does THIS function produce more benefit than cost? Could the net benefit be greater if modified employing fewer people?
Per capita federal employment has remained steady the past 40 years, so I don't see the argument that the U.S. harbors some massive jobs program a la some European countries that distorts the labor market. But it also varies widely by agency . . .DoD has had just MASSIVE amounts of money lobbed at it for decades, with lawmakers completely unwilling to demand accountability for the trillions of dollers allotted over time. What has transpired is a complex web of contractor/sub-contractor/fed employee silos.
Other agencies have been under-funded for years, like the Forest Service, and have relatively little fat to trim.
As a conceptual framework for regulation shouldn't the agency put forward its cost benefit analysis that yields a given decision and then invite comments on the analysis. In the example given why group X thinks that the cost the agency assumed for environmental damage to the Maine woods was too low or the fossil fuel companies think the damage assigned to CO2 emissions was too high and what the correct values should be. The agency then modifies the analysis (or does not) and goes forward (or not), possibly with a modified decision based on an analysis incorporating in the information from commentators. If commentators still think the cost benefit analysis is wrong, they sue.
Yes, but… The problem is if you disagree with the outcome, often the best way to defeat or delay implementation is to attack the analysis. I spent a career doing cost-benefit analysis, and the fact is the real world is messy and perfect data does not exist. There is ALWAYS more analysis that could be done to refine an assessment, and there are always assumptions and estimates that have to be made to complete an analysis of a real world problem. Delay is often victory for those opposing a regulation.
Which brings us back to: who has the money and power? They are the ones that will win, over and over. When they own the system...do we actually have a democracy?
This is a thoughtful critique of systemic dysfunction, but as a government efficiency expert, your focus should be on the crisis unfolding right now. DOGE isn’t just another example of inefficiency—it’s outright lawlessness, trampling competition and enabling the richest man in the world to hijack public institutions for personal gain. The USAID shutdown isn’t a distant policy failure; it’s killing people in real time. What we need most from you in this moment isn’t a broad discussion of dysfunction, but a clear, forceful stand against DOGE—explaining why it’s illegal, why it’s dangerous, and why it must be stopped.
What to me is missing is at least a few samples of where in the world it is done better. No, I don't mean Chinese Communist Party Agenda. Do the Danes or Finns or Spaniards get transmission lines built through rural small towns? I'd have a lot more hope & faith with a couple of current free-world examples of a process that works instead of all hand-wavey "reform" ideas.
Some bits:
U.S. subway construction costs are often 4-5 times higher than those in peer countries. For example, New York City subway extensions cost around $1.5-2.5 billion per kilometer, while similar projects in Paris, Madrid, or Seoul might cost $250-500 million per kilometer.
In the United States it costs roughly $609 million to build a kilometer of rail. In Canada it costs only $295 million and in Portugal, $96 million.
Sweden adopted the building code changes we were supposed to:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/08/headway/how-an-american-dream-of-housing-became-a-reality-in-sweden.html?searchResultPosition=1
This is a staggering indictment of our health as a democracy. Too many cooks in the kitchen, so unfortunately we cannot have nice things to eat.
Only thing worse would be actual "crooks" in the kitchen...hope that never happens...it can't happen here! It would never happen here. Ever...
On a personal note: my nephew is now a coder in Stockholm, which he loves. He can ride his bike all over the place. You don't need a car. His partner there trained as a nurse, didn't like the actual job, retrained as a lawyer, likes that. All because: Sweden! You could never do that here. We don't get options like that. Because we are Free!
She came here to visit, and described her big big rental SUV as "Ready for the Apocalypse!" And it wasn't even a Cybertruck, aka the Armored Personnel Carrier. That one would be ready for Day of the Locusts.
Swedes don't fear job loss like we do...oh, I could go on and on. They are not as materialistic, don't rush their kids to grow up so fast...but they can't deal with immigrants, either, sadly. And that Russian bear...
We are so screwed up here. My friends in Canada think we are a bunch of cowboys. And boy are they mad at the US now. Wayne Gretzky (!) is the new Charles Lindbergh, a turncoat. Amazing!
Maybe there is a Chaos Agent or two at work somewhere?
I will shortly be taking the NYC subway system, should I ask for people to pray for me?
Unions and regulations?
If Paris is able to build at significantly reduced cost compared to us, not sure the culprit is unions.
That's a good point. What is the difference then?
Honestly I'm not sure-not my area of expertise.
The real answer is industry, and the lessons that pub sec could take from industry in process now well exceed simple tech solutions. More than a few companies are bigger than dozens of nation states these days, but the idea that public sector has anything to learn from them on process is sneered at
I worked in financial and economic analysis in both the private sector and for the federal government. One difference I found is that at my company, when we had to do an analysis to make a decision, we scaled the depth of the analysis to the importance of the decision and the time frame when we needed the answer. We’d analyze, present the findings, make a decision, and move on. Once a decision was made, the alternatives were no longer an option in play. If we needed to adapt, we’d go forward from where we were.
In the government, every analysis had to be documented to the fifth decimal point and subjected to literally decades of second guessing, often in front of Congress. There was one hearing where my project manager was subjected to grilling about why there were cost overruns compared to a project baseline that had been published BEFORE HE WAS BORN.
Sounds like the problem here is with Congress, not the government department that has to answer to it. Was this project in the Defense Department, by any chance?
Am asking because I am sure you know how President (and retired General) Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, warned us about the "military-industrial complex," i.e. the defense industry, which he knew so well, and its mercenary motives? And the revolving door between the military and it? And how the voters wanted Federal money spent in their districts? Especially voters in Red states?
The tail, "government," often gets blamed instead of the dogs that wag it, who should.
Follow the money. My own little state (guess which it is) gets its money from: the hedge fund industry, the insurance industry, defense contractors, and Native American casinos. Our cities (which do not include Boston, hint), which used to employ a lot of people in factories, are all broke.
Speaking of efficiency: hello, American Health Care Industry? Priciest in the world by a wide margin. Finding creative ways, like a good corporate bureaucrat, to drive prices up for everything. How much can we mark this thing up? Ten times? Go for it.
Elon, why not tell the billionaire Vivek to drop the price of his drugs by half, or the government won't pay for it? No? Oh, right: when you are a celebrity, they 'let" you do it (aka "get away with it.")
And when you have political power, you can turn that into dollar$. Highly efficient way to get money. Easier than running a restaurant, where you have to actually feed people. But that's playing by the normal peoples' rules, not the airified rules of our Rulers.
BTW, when I was covering our Town Council for my local newspaper back in the day, I had the pleasure of listening as the attorneys on the council spent an hour trying to define the word "dust." They were just trying to keep dump trucks from spilling s--t all over the town roads. But how do you put these desires into words? Hmmm. Governing is hard, even for grownups with JD degrees.
Today's thought: shouldn't our decision makers be held accountable for their actions? Such as:
"You break it, you bought it?"
Or: "Breaking and entering?"
Asking for a friend.
This is a great point; bureacrats aren't the ones by and large creating these burdensome processes and procedures . . they're following what Congress instructed them to do!
Lol, love the baseline published before he was born
Those big companies are allowed to fire people that don't perform
Environmentalists are often the bogeyman in these discussions, and the positions they defend are sometimes unwise. But the environmental movement has learned its lessons and is now very effective at doing precisely the kind of slow, deliberate, careful coalition-building that you criticize, with the result that they have had some major wins like the "once in a generation" 2019 public lands bill that was supported by Mitch McConnell and signed into law by President Trump. Who would have thought that Republicans would create 1.3 million acres of new wilderness, add 3 national park units and expand 8 others? But the bill passed the Senate 92 to 8.
Such work is slow -- negotiations took hundreds of participants several years -- and not well suited to the kind of infrastructure projects that you write about. Sometimes, as in your transmission line example, there are going to be losers, no matter what. But progress was undeniably made. Congress did their jobs and hammered out a compromise that balanced competing interests, and once the decision was reached, implementation was simple.
So, how do you enable implementation to be driven through to completion once Congress has spoken, while allowing some -- but not too many -- avenues of legal recourse to correct bad decisions? You suggest limiting public input, but I think there's a difference between limiting public input *during* the implementation stage, and limiting public participation in general. I would agree that the former is necessary to a functioning country, but the latter seems undemocratic, undesirable, and likely to generate decisions that get more pushback later on.
BTW, I'm really enjoying your book!
Washington Post article about the public lands bill: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2019/02/12/senate-just-passed-decades-biggest-public-lands-package-heres-whats-it/
The environmental lobby also has some widely diverse cohorts . . .groups like the Nature Conservancy, Wildlife Conservation Society, and WWF have become much more pragmatic in juggling different constituencies and finding compromise, whereas Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth are still stuck in the 1970s mindset of "block all development".
“You see: It is difficult to write about topics where multiple angles are all, simultaneously, partially true, and where it is easy to get attacked for saying things that different groups may perceive as bad. The Western mind has been trained in reductive, dualistic, binary thinking which no longer serves us when issues are complex and bleed into each other in many intricate ways.”—Daniel pinchbeck, on a totally different topic. But I think having these hard conversations, however imperfectly, is the only way forward
One of the things we should think hard about is allowing mistakes to be made but then requiring just compensation. One of the biggest tragedies in the mid-century era of ramming freeways through our cities is that people who were displaced were not paid a fair price for their properties, and the devaluation for nearby properties that weren’t taken wasn’t compensated at all. But we can imagine an alternative where all taken properties were paid for 120% of value, and the devaluation of nearby properties was also paid for. This would have effectively prevented almost all freeways from being built through dense areas, because it would have been way too expensive, but it would have allowed some small, high value projects to go ahead.
Conversely in rural areas where land is cheap and new infrastructure can actually adds value, projects would be fairly feasible.
But the last thing is, so much of this is just aesthetics. People just don’t like seeing things change. And we have to get over that as a society and stop letting aesthetic preferences carry the force of law.
John Ralston Saul's book "Voltaire's Bastards" covers similar themes. Not fixing a problem (road widening) tends to deliver future earnings (one more lane, income generated & 'congestion' unfixed awaiting the next milking). A lot of consultation is set out like a parent asking kids whether they want brussell sprouts with dinner or ice cream...fated to invoke a short term sugar fix tragedy of the commons. I don't know what the right balance is but checked and balanced competent authorities making decisions in a timely manner in the public interest sounds pretty close to me. It doesn't mean everyone gets a prize or ice cream for dinner but hopefully a healthier, wealthier, robust and resilient future. Considered parenting not 'daddy' blindly tearing down Chesterton fences.
The democrats have a deep democracy problem of their own. Until they admit how undemocratic and dishonest the presidential campaign of Joe Biden then Kamala Harris was I don't know how anybody could trust them. They are hypocrites to clutch their pearls about the Republicans destorying democracy with their actions of a wholly undemocratic candidate choice process for 2024/25.
Action plan: 1. Joe Biden and everyone involved in pretending he was fit to run apologize to the American people for the bully lie that Biden was fit to run. 2. Run a really democrat primary....fairly districbute money for elections, use rank choice voting, allow anyone on the ticket and remove the barriers, outline the ways they will change their behavior to be more democratic themselves, run much younger candidates (diversity in government needs to include ages of people serving too...not just gender, race, etc)...plus many other ways smarter people than me have outlined. Actions speak louder than words....especially when the words are lies.