Over and over again, Biden officials would tell me about laws they had managed to get exemptions from. The broadband provisions of the infrastructure bill were exempted from the Administrative Procedures Act; the bulk of semiconductor investments from the CHIPS Act were exempted from the National Environmental Policy Act. If you need to seek this many exemptions from the existing laws for your signature projects, I asked, doesn’t that suggest you should try to change the laws themselves?
Here, Sullivan sounded resigned. “To actually change the National Environmental Policy Act itself — how many times a year do we change major foundational pieces of legislation in major and consequential ways? It’s extremely rare. You can take something like the child online privacy law that has something like 80 percent support in polls, and they can’t even pass that. We have lost the capacity to legislate in this country in a meaningful way. Major legislation is such a heavy lift and so easily blocked that it falls to chief executives to use whatever exclusions or workarounds they can muster.”
But it’s not as if the Biden administration tried to change these laws and failed. It never tried. Biden never gave a speech saying what his top staff members now say to me so freely. His administration never released a proposal for how to rewrite the laws and rebuild the state to accomplish its goals. Maybe the next Democratic administration will.
In March, Brian Deese, who led the National Economic Council under Biden, published a blistering piece in Foreign Affairs called “Why America Struggles to Build.” It is, for my money, one of the most important essays any Democrat has written since the election. It is both an admission that the Biden administration failed to fix what ailed America and a credible sketch of a liberal approach to doing just that. Deese wrote:
Building physical capacity — housing, energy generation, transmission lines, factories, data centers — is more critical to the U.S. economy today than it has been for decades. After 15 years of insufficient housing construction, the lack of affordable homes is lowering the country’s annual economic output, potentially by hundreds of billions of dollars. After 25 years of stagnant investment in energy networks, an inability to meet rising electricity demands risks increased consumer costs and more frequent blackouts. And for decades, the United States has failed to properly invest in the industrial capabilities necessary to build important infrastructure, including semiconductor factories, nuclear power plants and critical supply chains. In the process, it has ceded some technological ground to China and other adversaries at a time of intensifying global competition over new technologies.
Deese embraces what might be called an “all of the above” strategy for making it easier for America to build and for the government to act. He proposes more spending and less regulation, attacks on concentrated corporate power and outdated environmental laws, using federal money to force states to allow more housing and infrastructure even as he insists that Democrats confront the parts of their own coalition that cling to the tools of delay.
And he recognizes, crucially, that all of this is within our power to achieve. The proof is that we achieved it before. These laws and rules and regulations that obstruct what we need to do today were solutions to the problems we faced in the past. In mid-20th century America, we really were building too recklessly, with too little consideration for the damage being inflicted on the environment and communities. Passing these laws was not easy — there were special interests and truculent members of Congress in the 1970s, too — but it was done, and it worked.
