Why can’t America build anymore? The US has become astonishingly slow (and increasingly expensive) when delivering basic infrastructure. Journalist and Abundance co-author Derek Thompson explores how a tangled web of bureaucracy, overregulation, and political dysfunction has paralyzed our ability to execute. 

It’s not just inefficiency—it’s a deep cultural and institutional failure to prioritize outcomes over process.

DEREK THOMPSON: It's not just housing that we can't build in this country anymore. It's just about everything. We can't build housing fast enough. We can't build clean energy fast enough. We can't build affordable transit. The most expensive mile of subway in the world is in New York City. We can't build infrastructure. California authorizes $33 billion to build a high speed rail system, that 15, 20 years later does not exist. We can't build skyscrapers as fast as we used to. We can't build just about anything at the speed or affordability that we were once able to just decades ago. And this isn't just about the fact that the physical world has been entangled in rules and laws that make it hard for business to build. Often, it's the government getting in its own way. I'm Derek Thompson. I'm a journalist and I'm the co-author of the book, "Abundance" with Ezra Klein.

- [Narrator] Is DOGE making the government more efficient?

- So now we have DOGE, right, Department of Government Efficiency. And from a certain vantage point, you'd think I'd be a huge fan of DOGE, right? One of the major criticisms of this book is that government isn't efficient enough at achieving its own ends. The problem with DOGE, however, is that it might call itself a Department of Government Efficiency, but in practice it's a department of government evisceration. It's a project to destroy government as we understand it, not to help it work more efficiently. So what does that mean? Well, you look at what DOGE has done, for example, in the FDA, right? The Federal Drug Administration is charged with approving, for example, phase three clinical trial drugs that are healthy and can help Americans lead longer and healthier lives. But look at what DOGE has done to the FDA. They haven't just laid off dozens of people. They've laid off so-called probationary employees who are often highly educated, young, upwardly mobile, recently promoted employees who are exactly the type of people you would want to hire more of at the FDA in order to make that department more efficient. I think the most parsimonious way to explain what DOGE is doing is not working to make government more efficient, but working to destroy the parts of government that it associates with the progressive administrative state so that power in the executive branch can be fully centralized around whatever Donald Trump wants to do. That's not my vision of government efficiency, but here's where I think it's really, really important for liberals to not be the simple pro-institutionalists, who always just defend the status quo when they see it attacked. We need to recognize that some institutions are being attacked in part because they're blame worthy. I do think it's a huge problem that in the last few decades, liberals have associated success with how much money they can authorize and spend rather than what they can build in the world. That's how you get a world where, for example, you know, Californians are proud to authorize $33 billion to build a high speed rail system, but no high speed rail system exists. Or a world where Biden is proud to announce $7.5 billion for electric vehicle charger stations and practically none of it is built. So I am very interested in actual government efficiency. I am interested in government getting out of its own way and making it easier to achieve what are often progressive ends. Building high speed rail, connecting low income Americans to the internet, building out a network of electric vehicle charger stations to electrify and clean America's relationship to energy. These are all my goals, and these are all things that current progressive governance cannot do efficiently. So yes to government efficiency, no to DOGE. So in many cases, politics is fought along axes. Are you liberal or are you conservative? Do you believe in higher taxes or do you believe in lower taxes? And one of these axes that you hear about a lot is, should government be bigger or smaller? I'd prefer to think about a different axis, which is, should government be more or less effective? Should government work faster or slower? You know, for example, in June 2023, a bridge along I-95 collapsed in Pennsylvania, an absolute crisis for the region. Almost 200,000 cars pass over that bridge every single day, so we're talking about millions of trips being interrupted every single week. Under typical conditions, it would've taken about 12 to 24 months to rebuild that bridge. But instead, the governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, declared emergency. He said, we're not going to have normal processes to rebuild this bridge. We won't have environmental review. We won't go through the typical procurement process. We're not going to have a typical bidding process. I'm gonna point to two construction companies that are already in the region and I'm going to award the contracts to them expeditiously. I'm gonna hire union labor and they're gonna work 24/7 to build as fast as possible. And they did. And rather than this bridge getting built in 12 months, it was rebuilt in 12 days. Is that an example of big government, small government? No, big versus small is simply the wrong axis along which to evaluate this political success. This was about fast government, effective government. It was about prioritizing speed and outcomes in the physical world. In a way, the story of the I-95 bridge is like the photo negative of the story of the last 50 years of American governance and building in this country. Because what was prioritized here was the question, how do we do something that is absolutely critical to the public good as fast as possible? Rather than listen to as many different groups as possible, make this process as fair as possible, no matter how long it takes to complete it. Speed was prioritized over process and the voters loved it. Josh Shapiro became like a minor celebrity, or maybe even major celebrity in American politics because of this achievement. And I want other people to recognize that this is possible. It's possible to choose speed, it's possible to choose outcomes, and the problem of American governance and unfortunately liberal governance over the last 50 years is that we haven't chosen outcomes and we haven't chosen speed. We've chosen a particular system of listening to input in a way that made it impossible to actually do things.