Why Can’t America Build Anything Anymore?

When you picture the America of the future, what do you see?

Driverless cars darting between glittering high-rises?

Clean energy powering the economy?

High-speed rail whisking us around the country?

Those visions … are probably not going to happen. At least not on our current trajectory.

In fact, a more accurate vision of the future is probably one where … we’ve just got all the same infrastructure as today.

Except now it’s all old, obsolete, and breaking down.

Because, while there’s lots of exciting new technology waiting just around the corner … we’re not actually allowed to build most of it.

[OPENING SEQUENCE]

America is a nation of builders.

The Empire State Building: completed in just over a year.ⁱ

The Pentagon, with its six and a half million square feet of office space: completed in 16 months.ⁱⁱ

The over-1,600-mile Alaska Highway: completed by a team of more than 10,000 men in under nine months.ⁱⁱⁱ

And, honestly, those guys kinda deserve extra credit because…

You might notice, however, that all these projects have something in common: They all happened a really long time ago.

These days, the most well-known infrastructure projects are famous for how long they take.

The planning for the overhaul of Boston roads known as the “Big Dig,” began in 1982. The project wasn’t finished until 2007.^iv

Planning documents for New York City’s Second Avenue Subway were submitted in 2004. In 2017 … part of it opened.^v The rest should be finished no later than 2039.^vi

In California, voters approved plans for high-speed rail between Los Angeles and San Francisco in 2008. And it’s currently scheduled to open … sometime before the heat death of the sun.^vii

So, what happened? How did we go from a nation of roll-up-our-sleeves builders to a nation strangled with red tape? There are a lot of answers to that question, but one in particular stands out.

Like most troubling stories, this one starts in the 1970s. That’s when President Richard Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act, usually referred to as NEPA. And NEPA’s intentions were about as good as you could imagine — making sure that the federal government factored in the environmental effects of new projects.^viii

Moreover, this hardly seemed like an exercise in bureaucracy at the time. In the early days of the law, the studies of projects’ environmental impacts often ran fewer than 10 pages.^ix And the White House estimated that the review process would never take more than a year.^x

But today? The average length of those studies is 661 pages, with some of them stretching to over 2,000.^xi And the average length of time it takes to go through the process is four and a half years, with a quarter of projects taking six years or longer.^xii

And just to be clear: That’s not six years to build something; that’s six years to get the paperwork in order.

NEPA — and a variety of similar rules and regulations everywhere from the federal government all the way down to the local level — have made it so that the process of getting approval to build something tends to be way harder than the actual building itself. And that slows down … well, almost everything.

In Denver, for instance, it took about five years to widen a 12-mile section of interstate 70^xiii — but that was just the construction. The study that was required before any shovels went in the ground ran to nearly 9,000 pages. With over 7,300 pages of appendices. And took 13 years to complete.^xiv

Plans for an offshore wind development off of Cape Cod began in 2001 and ended — 16 years and $100 million later — when the project’s founder walked away from it because of his inability to get approval.^xv

That project wasn’t just derailed by regulations, it was derailed by lawsuits — which are also a huge part of the story here. Because under NEPA anyone can sue over a project they don’t like.^xvi And, boy, do they.

A study from Stanford found that between 2010 and 2018, 31 percent of projects to build transmission lines faced lawsuits. The number was 38 percent for wind projects, 50 percent for pipelines, and nearly 2/3 for solar projects.^xvii

Who’s doing all the suing? Actually, just a handful of environmental NGOs.^xviii

Which you could maybe understand if they were delivering big wins for the planet — but that’s rarely what’s going on here. A decade-long analysis of these kinds of suits found that they delayed clean energy projects by an average of just under four years — and that the courts ruled against them more than 70 percent of the time.^xix

That’s what’s led one scholar to say “There are a couple of trillion dollars available to develop the clean-energy economy. Except we can’t build anything.”^xx

But the cost of these delays isn’t just measured in time and money. It’s measured in the decay of our existing infrastructure. Because an inability to build new stuff means we’re stuck with old stuff … that’s often breaking down.

A water main breaks somewhere in American every two minutes, which means we’re losing an estimated six billion gallons of treated water each day.^xxi The levees that protect us from floods are an average of 50 years old.^xxii As of 2021, it was estimated that the country had over 46,000 bridges considered “structurally deficient.”^xxiii

So, if it feels like we’re not building anything anymore, that’s because we’re not — at least by comparison. Analysis from Stanford found that in the 2010s the number of projects that successfully made it through the NEPA process was less than 10 percent what it was back in 1976.^xxiv

And it’s not like politicians don’t know that this is a problem. The Obama,^xxv Trump,^xxvi and Biden^xxvii Administrations all supported efforts to make the permitting process more efficient. But none of them were able to overcome the activists and enact reforms that made a significant difference.

Those kinds of reforms — freeing up our creative energies, while still protecting the environment — could change the face of the country.

They could restore our decaying infrastructure. They could propel us into a future of new and exciting technologies. And they could turn America back into a nation of builders.

This time hopefully with fewer bears.