Opinion | “Try to build anything and you are entering mobile sands”

More and several times, biden officials talked about the laws from which they had managed to obtain exemptions. The broadband provisions of the infrastructure bill have been exempt from the law on administrative procedures; Most of the semiconductor investments by the Chips law have been exempt from the National Environmental Policy Act. If you need to look for many exemptions from the existing laws for your signature projects, I asked, not this suggests that you should try to change the laws themselves?

Here, Sullivan seemed to resign. “To actually change the National Environmental Policy Act itself – How many times per year we change important basic pieces of the legislation in main and consequential ways? It is extremely rare. You can take something like the child’s online privacy law that has something like 80 % support in the polls, and they cannot even go to that they have lost their ability. Alternative solutions they can collect.”

But it is not as if the Biden administration has tried to change these laws and has not failed. He never tried. Biden has never kept a speech by telling what his best staff members now tell me so freely. His administration has never released a proposal on how to rewrite the laws and reconstruct the state to achieve its goals. Perhaps the next democratic administration will do so.

In March, Brian Deesewho led the National Economic Council under Biden, published a piece of blisters In foreign affairs called “Why America struggle to build”. It is, for my money, one of the most important essays that a Democrat wrote from the elections. It is both an admission that the Biden administration has not managed to correct what has welcomed America and a credible sketch of a liberal approach to do this. Deese wrote:

Building physical ability – housing, generation of energy, transmission lines, factories, data centers – is more critical for the United States economy today than it has been for decades. After 15 years of insufficient housing construction, the lack of houses at affordable prices is reducing the country’s annual economic production, potentially hundreds of billions of dollars. After 25 years of stagnant investments in energy networks, the inability to meet the increase in electricity needs has an increase in the costs of consumer consumers and blackouts. And for decades, the United States He was unable to adequately invest in the industrial skills necessary to build important infrastructures, including semiconductor factories, nuclear power plants and critical supply chains. In the process, he sold some technological soil to China and other opponents when he intensifies global competition on new technologies.

Deese embraces what could be called a strategy “everything above” to make the construction of America easier and the government to act. It offers more expenses and less regulatory, attacks on concentrated corporate power and obsolete environmental laws, using federal money to force states to allow more accommodation and infrastructures even if it insists on the fact that the Democrats face the parts of their coalition that cling to the delay tools.

And above all he recognizes that all this is in our power to achieve. The test is that we reached it before. These laws and rules and regulations that hinder what we need to do today were the solutions to the problems we have had to face in the past. In the middle of the twentieth century America were really building too badly, with too little consideration for the damage inflicted on the environment and communities. Passing these laws was not easy – there were special interests and truculent members of the congress in the 70s – but it was done and worked.