Biden never finished his biggest projects. That’s a good thing.

I continue to be a little dumbfounded by the reversal of Joe Biden's fortunes among liberals. Less than a year ago he was being hailed as the best president since FDR, a guy who had unexpectedly exceeded every expectation for his progressive accomplishments. Today he's derided as an almost epic failure.

The proximate cause for this is Biden's meltdown in the June debate, followed by a long string of mea culpas from journalists who say they should have recognized his mental decline earlier—and who blame Biden and his staff for covering it up.

Fair enough—though I think the hand-wringing has been a little overwrought. Still, his accomplishments remain the same, don't they? Maybe not:

Doesn't seem great. pic.twitter.com/TNZN9Uegcu

— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) December 30, 2024

This critique of Biden's infrastructure record has become something of a hurricane lately—even among the "Build something, dammit" crowd. But what did they expect? Even in a perfect world without red tape it takes time to build big things from scratch. At a minimum:

1. States have to apply for initial funding.
2. The feds have to approve state plans.
3. Sites have to be located and purchased.
4. Competitive bids have to be solicited and then accepted.
5. If there are any lawsuits filed—and there will be—they have to be adjudicated.
6. Contractors have to draw up plans.
7. Then—finally!—they perform the actual construction.
8. All the money isn't allocated at one time, so circle back to step 1 for further funding.

This takes years. It always has. Remember all the talk about "shovel-ready projects" during the Obama stimulus era? This was an acknowledgment that building projects generally aren't great stimulus because you can't skip straight to step 7 unless you've already done the previous steps and kept a bunch of construction projects all set to go, just waiting to be unleashed during a recession.

But even theoretically this isn't possible for brand new projects like charging stations, semiconductor fabs, rural broadband, or rooftop solar. You have to start at step 1, which is one reason why they're almost always scheduled to be rolled out over ten years. (The other reason is that there's only so much construction capacity available. You can't do everything at once.)

Of course, in real life there's also red tape. What's more, some of it is legit by anyone's standards. For example, the Politico piece that Ezra quotes above says the rural broadband project has hit snags in Virginia:

The issue holding Virginia back appeared to be the law’s affordability requirement. According to funding rules published in May 2022 by the Commerce Department, any provider taking the federal money needs to offer a low-cost service option. The administration and Virginia were locked in a multi-month standoff over exactly how to fulfill that requirement — an impasse that hit many other states as well.

This is a perfectly reasonable requirement. But it's also perfectly reasonable that there's disagreement over how precisely to implement it. That's just the nature of the world.

There's nothing new about this. The interstate highway program took 36 years to complete. The California state water project took upwards of 40 years. The Erie Canal took eight years. The Tevatron particle accelerator took 14 years. So did Mount Rushmore. Boston's Big Dig took 25 years. The Evergreen Point Floating Bridge took 19 years. The Tennessee Valley Authority took 12 years just to complete its first phase. The Panama Canal took a decade.

In a follow-up tweet Ezra takes an implicit dig against Biden: "It's hard to run on your $42 billion expansion of broadband when it hasn't expanded broadband. Change is what gets built, not how much money gets appropriated to build." Sure. But what realistic alternative was there? If politicians are willing to support only projects that will be finished in time for reelection, nothing big ever gets done and we'd justifiably mock them for being cynical and short-sighted. At least Biden was never that.

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Author Of article : Kevin Drum

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