3 Takeaways - Why China Builds High Speed Rail - And The U.S. Can’t Build A Tunnel (#244)

Episode Date: April 8, 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.

In 2021, the U.S. 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. 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, I'm Lynn Toman and this is 3 Takeaways. On 3 Takeaways I talk with some of the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, newsmakers and scientists. Each episode ends with 3 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 is 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?

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. 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 laws interpreted it does. And so you have to get environmental approvals. 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. It's been, what, four years now? And they haven't succeeded in navigating. How typical is that? For infrastructure, certain types 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 to control burn because then they'll have to or some don't, and 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 too onerous. 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. 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 the civil rights law and environmental laws. Great, that's fine. 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 things as a thousand-page rule book. The Interstate Highway Act was 29 pages long, 1956. Ten 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, and you go through the day with these checklists and 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 a national 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...as I said, 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

rights 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 and 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. And the arguments turn on legal compliance and legal terms instead of what's good for the public, which should be political choice. So I don't think you can fix this system. I think you have to replace it. You have to replace it with one that acknowledges what we tried to abandon in the 1960s, which is the need for human choice. Effectively, what you're saying is that the approval process has so many different groups involved and that there are always going to be tradeoffs and there are always going to

be requests or demands for additional studies or analysis that no decisions can be made. And you believe the only way to become more effective is to have a more effective decision process. It's have a clear hierarchy of authority to make decisions where law is the framing, but whether a permit is given cannot be validated by law. Law is a framing for official authority, which is politically accountable. And today we look at it as a matter of legal compliance. It's not a matter of legal compliance. Courts should have almost nothing to do with it unless someone, you know, strays over the

boundaries and makes decisions they're not authorized to make. What's difficult about this is that there's so much law in the books now that trade-off judgments are themselves unlawful. What do you mean by that? Sometimes you have to decide which is more important, the endangerment species or the power.

No one has authority to make that choice. And courts get involved and say, oh, no, you've got to honor the desert tortoise or whatever it is, you know, you can't, you know, put in this wind farm or solar field or whatever. There's no lowest common denominator system that works. It's always tradeoffs. And all these laws, in effect, prohibit tradeoffs. So how can you run a society when you can't make tradeoffs, Jensie? You need a person to be accountable and be able to make the decision. Yes. And if we don't trust the person, then have an authority mechanism. So one of the things I recommend is that we replace years of what lawyers call ex ante process, hearings and proceedings that go on for years and stuff, that we have some

of that, you know, because public transparency is a good thing to have and not only environmental review is in general a good thing within reason, but it should be dozens of pages, not thousands of pages, because that's just some stores. It just gets no pebble left unturned. You end up getting lost in the details. So you replace most of the process before a decision with transparency, a decision, and then review by some authority group. In the case of infrastructure, I recommended creating a national infrastructure board that

would comment on big infrastructure projects and could approve them. That takes weeks, though that doesn't take years. It's not a legal decision. It's a judgment call by some other group. So if we're afraid that officials are going to be would-be Robert Moses' and put highways through good neighborhoods or whatever, then we can have a review mechanism with authority to veto them. So one of the things I found in a paper I wrote is that all of this process, depending on the area, increases the cost from two times to four

times. I believe that because many projects like pipelines take 10 plus years and there's no decision and they can't move forward. Yeah. Philip, what are your three takeaways? One, law can't govern. Humans govern. Law is a framework for governing.

That requires a change. So, next thing, what is the change? We need to have a decade, not unlike the 1960s, but in this case, it's a decade of recalification and simplification so that people take back control of government. People, school teachers and principals can actually have authority to run the schools. Transportation officials actually have the authority to give permits. And the third takeaway is, you know, right now we're in a period of vilification of government

because it's bloated and it doesn't work and it's ineffective. And it does need to get disrupted and replaced. But government is not the enemy in a crowded, interdependent society with a global economy. Government is more important, not less important. And so what we need to do is to remake it on a vision that allows government to work, that allows government to be responsive. And that requires simplifying it and rehumanizing it

and moving forward in a way that gives us all a sense that we're invested in our own future. I love your takeaway on government being more important now than ever. Thank you. I very much enjoyed your books, Everyday Freedom and Not Accountable. Nice to be with you, Lynn. If you're enjoying the podcast, and I really hope you are, please review us on Apple podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps get the word out. If you're interested, you can also sign up

for the Three Takeaways newsletter at threetakeaways.com where you can also listen to previous episodes. You can also follow us on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and Facebook. I'm Lynn Toman, and this is Three Takeaways. Thanks for listening.