3 Takeaways
Why China Builds High Speed Rail - And The U.S. Can’t Build A Tunnel (#244)
Tue, 08 Apr 2025
All across America, critical government infrastructure projects — building EV charger stations, expanding broadband, building rail tunnels — are stalled or abandoned. According to trail-blazing government reformer Philip Howard, powerlessness to get things done has become a defining feature of America. Listen and learn why, and how things can change.
Chapter 1: Why are major infrastructure projects in the U.S. stalled or abandoned?
In 2021, the US Congress allocated $42.5 billion to expand broadband to underserved areas. No money has been spent. Joe Biden's 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act allocated $7.5 billion to build a national network of EV car charging stations. Three years later, only 11 had been built.
Chapter 2: What examples illustrate America's aging infrastructure challenges?
New York and New Jersey have for decades been trying to rebuild the rail tunnels under the Hudson River, which were originally built in 1910. There are numerous other examples of stalled infrastructure projects. America today is essentially operating on road, rail, water, electric, and other infrastructure that were built over a hundred years ago. What's the problem? Hi, everyone.
Chapter 3: Who is Philip Howard and what is his perspective on government reform?
I'm Lynn Thoman, and this is Three Takeaways. On Three Takeaways, I talk with some of the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, newsmakers, and scientists. Each episode ends with three key takeaways to help us understand the world and maybe even ourselves a little better. Today, I'm excited to be with Philip Howard. He's a leader of government reform in America.
He has advised both Republican and Democratic parties. He's also an author, and his most recent books are Everyday Freedom and Not Accountable. I'm looking forward to finding out why, no matter who is elected, government almost never changes how it works. Welcome, Philip, and thanks so much for joining Three Takeaways today. Nice to be with you, Lynn. Philip, the U.S.
has a history of transformational public infrastructure projects, like the Erie Canal, the transcontinental railroads, and the interstate highway system. Could these projects have been built today?
Chapter 4: Could transformational projects like the Erie Canal be built today?
No, absolutely not. The chances are zero that you could get approval to build a canal like the Erie Canal or to build a railroad over a mountain range. Zero. You have all these environmentalists who demand lots of review and compliance with countless different mandates created over the decades.
Chapter 5: Why does environmental law complicate infrastructure development?
And they do so from the comfort of their homes and the economy that exists only because of things that they would never permit.
Let's start with a present day example, the Biden administration's inability to expand broadband, despite the fact that Congress allocated $42.5 billion to do that. What happened?
You wouldn't think that expanding broadband service would raise significant environmental issues, but the way environmental law is interpreted, it does. And so you have to get environmental approvals.
Chapter 6: How do multiple regulatory requirements create a bureaucratic labyrinth?
And then there are all these collateral goals that are built into the laws, such as you have to give a certain amount of business to women or minority-owned businesses, you know, and things like that.
And this accretion of requirements means that actually pushing the button to say go and having a contract, it's like a bureaucratic labyrinth of migraine proportions that takes years, years to navigate. And it's been, what, four years now? And they haven't succeeded in navigating. How typical is that? For infrastructure, certain kinds of infrastructure, it's extremely typical.
I mean, building transmission lines from renewable sources in the Midwest to the cities, for example, is so onerous that people don't even propose them because there are so many different levels of approval, depending on the state, because every infrastructure project has harmful environmental consequences. I mean,
A transmission line might go through a pristine forest or in someone's backyard, and someone will object to it. In California, one of the ways to reduce the risk of fires, of these wildfires, is to do controlled burns. But controlled burns require environmental review, and the neighbors don't want a controlled burn, or some don't. They'll have to smell smoke.
So you have mitigation measures absolutely essential to the health and safety of people who live in California that aren't done because the approval process is to earners.
So how do final decisions get made when you have 10 or 15 or more groups that are all analyzing and evaluating a project from many different perspectives?
Well, often they don't get made. When there's really a public imperative that there has to be a decision, often the process will go on for years, sometimes a decade or longer. And at some point, people kind of drop of exhaustion and they finally agree to dredge the Savannah River, this one that took 16 years. And sometimes they just give up on the projects. It just costs too much.
So who can make a decision to go forward on an infrastructure project?
No one. The law has made it so that no one has authority.
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Chapter 7: Who has the authority to make decisions on infrastructure projects?
How did the system that we have with so many groups involved in offering perspectives and analyzing and evaluating evolve?
In the 1960s, which was a very tumultuous decade, Americans woke up to all kinds of abuses of authority, racism, pollution, gender discrimination, abuse of disabled children, lies about the Vietnam War, you know. So we woke up to all these abuses and we needed to change our values. And we did. We created a civil rights law and environmental laws. Great. That's fine.
Chapter 8: How did the U.S. regulatory system evolve to its current complex state?
Changing values is a good thing to do. But the geniuses at the time said, well, we don't want any more abuses of authority. Let's change the way decisions are made in the public sector. So they got this idea that law should not only set goals or principles of non-discrimination, for example, but should also tell people exactly how to meet the goals.
Before that, you didn't have such a thing as a 1,000-page rulebook. The Interstate Highway Act was 29 pages long in 1956. 10 years later, 21,000 miles of road had been built. This new way of governing is that everybody would simply comply with detailed rules.
You know, when you go through the day with these checklists in the workplace to make sure that there is a material safety data sheet for dishwashing liquid in case somebody drank too much of it. Literally, that's the actual story. All this kind of, you know, make sure there's oxygen in the air.
And then things that are so self-evident that could be subsumed within a principle, you know, facilities, tools, and equipment shall be reasonably suited for the use intended. That's a perfectly good principle that people can, instead we have a thousand page rule book on it.
And then where there couldn't be rules, we got the idea that there should be neutral processes where people could prove the validity of their choices. So that's where we got this idea that you couldn't terminate any public employee unless you proved in a hearing that the employee was no good or so much worse than everybody else. How do you prove that... A teacher bores students or whatever.
I mean, how do you prove it? How do you prove who's a bad writer? How do you prove who doesn't try hard? How do you prove who doesn't get along with co-workers? How do you prove any of this stuff? You know, they're matters of judgment. That's the job of the supervisor.
And then the third leg of this stool of paralysis was the idea of giving people the individual right to complain about anything they didn't like. And so we created a system that's basically paralytic. And the rule books have gotten thicker and the procedures have gotten more lengthy and the rights have become rights for everyone. So we created a government where nobody can make decisions.
Can you summarize what you call the quicksand of the approval process?
Yes. It consists of thousands of specific requirements that are debated in scores of public hearings and meetings that are then challenged in court in litigation proceedings that themselves take three or four years and where no one on behalf of the public has the authority to make the trade-off judgments about whether it's a good project or not and should be approved.
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