At the start of the Great Depression and with seemingly impossible engineering challenges before them, San Francisco began construction on the Golden Gate Bridge, a project long-derided as “the bridge that couldn’t be built.” Workers constructed what was then the world’s longest and tallest suspension bridge amid fierce currents, fog, and high winds. Construction began in January 1933. Cars crossed the bridge by May 1937. The cost was $35 million. The feat rivaled the construction of the Empire State Building a few years earlier: 102 stories in 410 days and a month ahead of schedule. It was an age of builders, where seemingly impossible feats of engineering, great and small, were routine across America.
Nearly a century later and five miles away, San Francisco commissioned another public work: the Noe Valley public toilet. The 150-square-foot bathroom containing one metal toilet and a baby changing station was projected to cost $1.7 million and take over two years to build. After public outcry, the city accepted a donated modular bathroom alongside pro bono engineering and architectural work. The project still cost taxpayers around $200,000, as the donated toilet still required permitting and sign off from over a half-dozen agencies, including the Arts Commission.
It is easy to handwave the Noe Valley toilet as an outlier, but the same sad tale repeats itself across the country:
California’s high-speed rail project has spent $13 billion of its original $33 billion budget with little to show for it. Its estimated total costs have ballooned to $128 billion.
In two decades, America has completed only two large nuclear reactors from the ground up, seven years late and roughly $23 billion over budget. At its peak, America completed four or five a year.
An Arizona mine capable of supplying a quarter of U.S. copper demand has sat idle since its 1995 discovery, facing a 35-plus-year path to production due to permitting and litigation.
A 550-mile transmission line took 17 years to complete. Construction took two years. Legal battles took the rest. Its sister project took 15 years.
A 94% complete West Virginia pipeline stood idle for nearly a decade amid permitting disputes resolved only by an act of Congress and Supreme Court order.
These examples would be comical if they were not symptomatic of a deeper illness. Our communities face failing infrastructure, aging buildings, and utilities increasingly inadequate for a modern economy. America’s share of global manufacturing was 25% in 1997. It is 16% today. Absent intervention, it will fall to 11% by 2030.
These failures persist despite our access to technologies, capital, and expertise unimaginable in the age of builders.
We should be building faster and more safely than ever before. Instead, we are doing the opposite.
What is stopping us from building?
Democracy Is Not the Problem
Some blame our inability to build on democracy itself: too many disparate voices when efficiency demands a single, powerful voice. This view portrays embarrassing inefficiencies as the price of freedom, presenting a false choice between liberty and effective development.
While this argument is superficially persuasive—factories, data centers, ports, even whole cities seem to rise overnight in China while these projects would take years, if not decades, to build here—it ultimately gets it exactly wrong. History is replete with examples of authoritarian states dismally failing at industrial projects. Even when authoritarian states build, they often build inefficiently, rewarding raw output over profitability. The result is a system that builds things no one wants. It is why China, the model of authoritarian industrial might, produces ghost cities and vast industrial overcapacity it must then dump into the global economy.
Democracies can build at extraordinary speed when governments create the right conditions. After Congress created dedicated financing, national standards, and clear federal-state responsibilities in 1956, the United States opened roughly half of the Interstate Highway System within a decade. Modern democracies still demonstrate this capacity. Spain has built more than 3,800 kilometers of high-speed rail (second only to China) at comparatively low unit costs. Taiwan has paired one-stop industrial administration and ready access to land, power, and water to bring cutting-edge semiconductor fabs online in roughly two years.
Regime type is not the decisive variable. What matters is whether industrial policies enable construction: clear authority, standardized requirements, predictable financing, competent agencies, and rules that force governments to reach decisions rather than merely create opportunities to delay them.
Environmental Safety is Not the Problem
Another common fallacy holds that endless process is the price of environmental safety: that permitting, siting, and interconnection barriers delaying hundreds of renewable energy projects are somehow what lead to a clean environment.
The idea seems simple. Less building leads to less pollution. But industrial production does not disappear. It moves elsewhere, often to China, which emits two to three times more carbon per unit of output than America. Blocking a factory here does not eliminate emissions. It exports them to a dirtier producer. The result is an example of inadvertent policymaker murder-suicide: in demanding ever more onerous process, environmental advocates harmed both American industry and the environment.
Endless process does not save the environment. Canada and Australia—hardly known as environmental free-for-alls—permit mines up to five times faster. Madrid, bound by the EU’s strict environmental laws, expanded its metro faster and more cheaply than almost any city on Earth. Switzerland, no less committed to nature, bored the world’s largest rail tunnel beneath the Alps and delivered it a year ahead of schedule. These are not countries that decided nature matters less.
Instead, they emphasize substantive environmental protections while minimizing procedural delays. Environmental studies can be consolidated into a single permit. Courts review the permit’s legality, rather than endlessly relitigating the underlying analysis. Challenges run on short clocks. And the loser may bear the winner’s costs, disincentivizing frivolous suits. For highly consequential projects, legitimacy can be established up front.
The Real Problem: Rewarding Process Rather than Requiring Results
The United States did not take this approach. Instead, it married an extraordinarily demanding procedural apparatus to a litigation system seemingly incapable of finality.
The most notable culprit is the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Unlike substantive statutes such as the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act, NEPA is procedural. It requires agencies to analyze and disclose environmental impacts before major actions involving federal land, permits, or financing. As the Supreme Court observed in 2025, regulatory layering and aggressive litigation turned it from “a modest procedural requirement into a blunt and haphazard tool” employed to thwart new construction.
The result is years of procedural review under a statute that imposes no substantive environmental standard. In 2024, even the simple environmental assessments averaged over a year while the more demanding Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) took nearly four years. Department of Energy data puts the mean EIS cost at $6.6 million and even smaller assessments at $300,000. That is before legal fees, staff time, and litigation, meaning NEPA can push even the smallest projects over $1 million in permitting costs alone.
Like lampreys, these attacks latch on and slowly bleed a project dry. Clearing one review provides no finality, as opponents may bring another challenge using NEPA or a related statute.
Sometimes, the threat alone kills projects at inception. Investors understandably hesitate when a permit provides no certainty, meaning that capital cannot deploy and America cannot build.
Ironically, this procedural obsession often blocks projects meant to save the environment. It helped doom Cape Wind, a proposed 468-megawatt offshore wind project in Massachusetts, abandoned after more than 15 years and over $100 million without a single turbine built. Instead, developers spent their money answering “dozens of sometimes overlapping, often contradictory agencies, hundreds of officials and thousands of pages of impact statements,” and litigating various claims, such as the allegation that turbines nearly five miles offshore would disturb spiritual tribal resources.
This obsession with process repeats across industries, imposing costs on builders and the communities they serve. Transmission lines wait more than a decade amid permitting fights, while NEPA lawsuits disproportionately delay clean energy projects. The same procedural weapons are routinely turned on housing. State versions of NEPA are frequently used to block new homes, burdening families rather than polluters. And the problem extends beyond permitting. More than 2,000 gigawatts of energy capacity, nearly twice the existing U.S. power fleet, sit waiting to connect to the grid in an “interconnection queue” that now averages about five years per project.
None of this protects the environment, helps consumers, or lets America rebuild. It is the fetishization of process: endless rechecking and re-litigation without result. And it is self-perpetuating. We have built regulatory labyrinths that only the largest firms can afford to navigate, creating an ecosystem of attorneys, accountants, and consultants paid to guide companies through the maze who, as a result, have every incentive to keep it standing.
We thus tax the innovator twice, once by the state and again by the outside expert, slowing progress and discouraging the building of vital businesses and infrastructure. The cost and complexity keep new companies from building and push established ones abroad, often to jurisdictions where the same output pollutes more. It is the worst of all worlds.
A Bipartisan Solution
So what is the secret of nations that build? They reward responsible construction rather than delay. We can have a vibrant democracy that protects the environment alongside historic reindustrialization. Our procedure is the problem. And that is eminently fixable.
Thankfully, there is a growing bipartisan consensus to do exactly that. Petrochemical executives, renewable energy advocates, builders, and bankers, among other unlikely allies, support permitting reform. The Senate’s Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026 along with similar bipartisan House bills give that coalition a concrete path forward. These provisions deserve support because they address the uncertainty that keeps companies from committing capital to American factories and infrastructure. Here are five priorities that the final bill must address:
Limit Procedural Review: The Supreme Court has confirmed that NEPA is procedural. The Senate bill would codify that principle and generally allow construction to continue while agencies correct NEPA errors, rather than halting projects for those errors. It also expedites judicial review to quickly resolve any legitimate disputes. The bill would additionally curtail NEPA’s current expansive jurisdiction by establishing that a federal loan or loan guarantee alone would not trigger NEPA review for nearly all privately developed project.
Enforce Hard Deadlines: Congress should impose hard deadlines for federal authorizations, adequately staff permitting personnel, and provide enforceable remedies when agencies fail to act. The Senate bill does so, creating not only firm deadlines for agencies but deadline-enforcement legal mechanisms that incentivize prompt agency decisions.
Establish One Project, One Review: Congress should designate a lead agency and, as the Senate bill would allow, bind federal participants to one coordinated review and expedited schedule to the maximum extent practicable. The bill would also allow qualifying state or tribal environmental reviews to satisfy NEPA when the lead agency determines they serve a similar function. Canada, the EU, and Australia use similar models.
Make Permits Final: Injunctions based on procedural flaws should not halt construction. Agencies likewise should not rescind validly issued permits absent extraordinary circumstances. The Senate bill would prohibit injunctive relief for procedural NEPA errors and provide reinstatement, legal fees, and financial compensation for unlawful government interference.
Simplify Permitting: Agencies can clear routine activities without time-consuming environmental assessments or impact statements through categorical exclusions. While existing authority allows agencies to adopt each other’s categorical exclusions, too few have done so. The Senate bill would permit combinations of applicable exclusions, require a public cross-agency inventory, and direct agencies to develop or adopt exclusions for specified grid and storage projects. Congress should also encourage federal-state partnerships that pre-clear sites for environmental review, utilities, and zoning, allowing companies to build in weeks rather than years. Taiwan uses a similar model to great effect.
These bipartisan reforms would strip away procedural deadweight, allowing us to build again while simultaneously safeguarding our environment and encouraging the dynamism of a free society.
The Golden Gate Bridge was called “the bridge that couldn’t be built.” Four years later and despite every naysayer’s objection, it was. We are the same country today, except we empower the naysayers rather than the builders.
That needs to change. We did not lose the capacity to build great things. We buried it under layers of senseless process.
We are a nation that is ready to build again. It is time for Congress to clear the way.
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How much did the federal government contribute to the construction of the Empire State Building and the Golden Gate Bridge?
excellent article and I hope makes people pause.