President Trump has spent the first few weeks of his second term bulldozing through the federal bureaucracy. He says that the government and its rules are inefficient and, during his first term, got in the way of executing his agenda.
Democrats may not approve of Trump’s targets — foreign aid and consumer protection agencies — or the potential constitutional crisis he initiated when he tried to eliminate them. But some Democrats might envy the speed at which he cut through red tape. After all, liberal lawmakers have for years complained about bureaucracy that moved too slowly and rules that stifled their ambitions.
One such Democrat was Joe Biden. Toward the end of his term as president, he said his administration was too slow to roll out his infrastructure law. “Historians will talk about (how) great the impact was,” Biden told USA Today last month. “But it didn’t have any immediate impact on people’s lives.”
Similarly, Barack Obama promised “shovel-ready” projects to help revitalize the economy, but they were slow to get started. “Shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected,” Obama said in 2011. Gov. Gavin Newsom of California has criticized his state’s troubled high-speed rail project. “I watched as a mayor and then a lieutenant governor and now governor as years became decades,” he said in 2023. “People are losing trust and confidence in our ability to build big things.”
Democrats typically run for office promising to make government help people. But Democrats have also enacted rules to improve workplaces, stop unfair business practices and protect the environment. Even when those rules work well, they impose additional requirements on new public and private projects. Today’s newsletter explains why some Democrats were starting to rethink their approach even before Trump took office.
Getting permits
Building new things in America can be very hard.
Consider clean-energy projects. These are meant to create jobs — in solar, wind, nuclear and so on — and combat climate change. But passing a law that spends money on such projects is only the first step. The companies and agencies involved have to apply for permits and show they meet regulatory standards to start construction. The government takes time to assess those applications.
The process can last months or years before building begins. More than two years after Congress enacted $5 billion to electric vehicle charging stations, just two states — Ohio and New York — had opened any. After three years, the number of stations nationwide numbered in the mere dozens, out of thousands the program could eventually build.
Sometimes, other problems get in the way. One project, known as the Grain Belt Express, would build electricity lines to connect turbines in windy Kansas to not-so-windy Missouri, Illinois and Indiana. Developers proposed the project in 2010. Fifteen years later, construction has not started. Why? Every jurisdiction in the path of the electrical lines needs to sign off. At one point or another, at least one agency has opposed the project.
Legal challenges have also blocked or delayed hundreds more clean-energy projects, according to the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. Activists often use environmental laws to try to stop projects that they oppose, such as offshore wind turbines along the East Coast. (Yes, there is a certain irony in using environmental laws to block action on climate change.)
In some cases, opponents have real concerns. They might worry that giant power lines will ruin vistas that drive tourism or that a solar farm will damage local ecosystems. The question is if those drawbacks, however legitimate, outweigh the benefits — and how to balance competing goals.
The balancing act goes beyond clean energy. Environmental protections can stop water and air pollution, but they can also create new hurdles for road and rail projects. Labor rules can make workplaces safer and fairer, but they can also make it too expensive to open a factory for semiconductor chips. Zoning laws can help preserve the feel and look of a neighborhood, but they can also make it difficult to build housing.
Building trust
These issues can seem wonky and technical. The phrase “permitting reform” is not the sort of slogan that drives voters en masse to the polls. But it matters for Biden and other Democrats’ legacies.
When Biden took office in 2021, he promised to show that the government can help everyday Americans. “We have to prove democracy still works,” Biden said in his first address to Congress. “That our government still works — and we can deliver for our people.”
The leisurely pace of change means Americans may never see much of Biden’s proof. The Trump administration is trying to unilaterally take back some of Biden’s infrastructure and clean-energy spending. The Republican-controlled Congress has vowed to repeal much of it, too. If the Biden administration had already doled out the money, Trump and Congress could not easily claw it back. But because much of it was never spent, Republicans can stop projects before they even begin.
Related: Progressive lawmakers have erected barriers to their own policies, Marc Dunkelman writes in The Atlantic. His new book, “Why Nothing Works,” proposes solutions.
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