Why Can’t America Build “Great” Again?

Though now headless, the DOGE dragon continues to lay waste as it writhes through the federal government on the trail of alleged waste and fraud. People are catching on to the widespread damage wrought by the carpet bombing, but the work is still applauded by those who believe that the wanton destruction of government capacity will lead to reform.

After all, the last election saw centrist voters shifting to Trump’s radicalism because they were fed up with a “system” that was not working for them. Trump promised to disrupt business as usual—which he has certainly done.

Outrageous failures

Democrats and those who reject Trumpist corruption, power-grabbing and vindictiveness, look in vain for candidates who focus on fixing broken systems for housing production and healthcare access—to name two top-of-mind issues. Instead both progressive and moderates make empty promises about the housing they will build or the healthcare they will enhance but they have no roadmap to achieve their goals.

There is much handwringing today that America in general and government in particular “can’t build things.” This is part of the argument New York Times columnist Ezra Klein and Atlantic senior editor Derek Thompson make in their much-discussed book Abundance.They are outraged to find the California high-speed rail project to which billions were committed years ago has gotten just about nowhere. But such boondoggles are not new, they are just being discovered by the liberal pundit class.

New York is one of the serial abusers of capital projects. It presciently bought land and dammed waterways to create one of the most admired water-supply systems in the world—in the 19th century. To backstop its two aging water-delivery tunnels it undertook the construction of a third in 1970, and largely completed it four decades later.

The MTA keeps subways and commuter lines running but spends colossal amounts of money on capital projects, famously $2.5 billion per mile to complete (in 2017) a 1.8-mile section of the Second Avenue subway, a project that began in the 1970s envisioned to serve much of the east side of Manhattan that likely will never be completed.

MTA operates trains with manually operated signals almost a century old. The operators’ bathroom breaks delay thousands. Yet the machinery doesn’t get replaced at speed because dealing with all the old signals is a $3 billion proposition. Making a single station accessible via elevators can cost $20 million. When you accumulate all the items it takes to keep a sprawling rail infrastructure spread over hundreds of square miles operating day in and day out, the costs are simply overwhelming even for a system that serves millions per day.

I could go on.

It’s an outrage. But New York voters have tended to give the endless empty promises by politicians and MTA leadership a pass. How many times have political candidates promised to root out “waste and fraud”—and proceeded to do neither? Hence, pledging to fix government dysfunction typically fails to move voters.

That could be changing.

With widespread unhappiness with government institutions, voters are listening to candidate promises to blow up business as usual. After all, New York’s non-progressive, non-ideological center shifted consistently right in the 2024, giving fresh right-wing faces a shot at fixing things.

The closest to a competence candidate for New York City mayor is Andrew Cuomo, currently fighting it out at the top of the polls with Zorhan Mamdani, a charismatic progressive. As governor, Cuomo bullied the obdurate MTA and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to wrap up long-delayed projects but he did not attack the systemic problems in these agencies and so they continue to underperform. (Mamdani overpromises with little evidence that he can deliver.)

Why so slow? Why so expensive?

I joined the New York City Department of Design and Construction in 2015 in part because I wanted to learn both how government works and how it fails. DDC’s responsibilities stretch across a vast landscape of buildings and infrastructure. It engineers major water and sewer projects, renovates roads as well as building and remodeling structures serving some 20 agencies, homeless shelters and juvenile justice to libraries and senior centers. I joined an organization capable of excellence but its processes continue to be excruciatingly slow and expensive.

I asked why, as so many had before me. The dance a renovation of a community library goes through, for example, is revealing.

First, New York has not one but three library systems and they must pitch their capital construction needs to the city council. That’s assuming there is a rational assessment of their state of repair. (There are 219 branch libraries in NYC.) The council allocates money, never enough.

Negotiations ensue, with DDC often bouncing the project back to the library system until it can get more money. Then a lengthy design process begins, entailing numerous reviews which are supposed to assure compliance with a growing number of mandates from the city council, such as rules about community consultation and minority hiring, energy and climate sensitive design, reviews of esthetic excellence, and so on.

But I saw that the process from inception to move-in lacked clarity. I was looking for a diagram of how projects moved through the numerous steps and approvals. To my astonishment, there was no widely agreed-to roadmap, so projects would sometimes languish in some bureaucratic corner. Units within the organization had overlapping responsibilities and outside budget and legal watchdogs demanded periodic reviews but were not sensitive to how long their reviews would take. Nor did not own up to their lack of expertise, nor the unreasonableness of some requirements. This byzantine maze blurred accountability throughout the process so that issues that should have been resolved months earlier arose during construction—to much costly fingerpointing.

I wondered how anything got built. Actually some quite superb projects were realized but the endless wait for projects sent agencies hunting for faster and cheaper ways to get their projects done. Some were able to develop design and construction expertise in-house, which is duplicative. Others wanted to work through the Economic Development Corporation, which is a quasi-government agency intended to help businesses thrive in New York but has developed a considerable design and construction expertise that does not have to jump through so many hoops. Thus, if a project can make the case that it is advancing economic growth in the city, it can be built by EDC. With its slimmer, more nimble process, it has the capacity to deliver high-quality projects in a reasonable time frame.

The obvious question is: why can’t DDC operate like EDC? The city’s political leadership has never asked that question and so the costly and ineffective delivery of projects goes on.

Businesslike governance?

Simplistically, the answer is to run government agencies like private businesses. The primary difference between government and private businesses, though, is who they serve and how they serve them. Businesses have two straightforward agendas: to make money and to please customers sufficiently that they will come back for more. Effectiveness and success can be relatively easy to measure.

Government agencies are supposed to serve their constituents and stakeholders. These can be many with diverse agendas of their own. A garbage transfer station in Seattle, located where an industrial district transitions to a residential one became subject to a variety of demands by locals: It had to be tucked into a hillside to reduce its visual impact. A small dog-walking park and kids playground and an attractive rain garden to manage stormwater runoff were added to the project. All of these objectives are worthy, and the architect, Mahlum, handsomely fit all these disparate pieces together, but it came at a $108-million cost. A planned police station in the city was cancelled after the cost ballooned, largely attributable to amenities neighbors insisted on.

Effectiveness in government is not always easy to measure—judging the effectiveness of teachers, for example, is perpetually a topic of debate. Projects and initiatives can fall victim to agenda creep (as happened in Seattle), to legislative whim, and official neglect. If elected official are not clarifying the mission of agencies, demanding that they work effectively by defined criteria, and then holding them accountable, the agencies can lose their way or become subject to special-interest capture.

This said, DOGE is not at all concerned about effectiveness or capacity to do the jobs we ask of government. It is purely disruptive, often driven by ideology, intended to make government subservient to the president (when not being looted by those who have bought favor from the Trump administration). DOGE does not know how to fix anything, as we are all painfully learning.

Is there another way? Well you could do what conservative politicians often do: Deep six entire departments and entire tasks—the most appealing targets being agencies and initiatives that serve low-income voters or have diffuse functions where stakeholders have trouble coalescing to lobby for their cause.

Conservative competence?

Give the small-government conservatives credit for their focus on low taxes and low costs, though voters may also be letting them off too easy. Conservatives spend big on law enforcement, jails, and prisons, but too often lack the low crime statistics to show for it. (Permissive gun regulations contribute to mayhem and enrich private prison operators. Prisons and jails are pretty terrible everywhere because they can’t recruit high quality officers. New York’s Rikers Island has been a death sentence for detainees who have not even by convicted of a crime.

Conservative states tend to underspend on education and so can’t recruit the well-educated entrepreneurs that have powered the economies of knowledge hub cities. Instead they lavish taxpayer dollars on an assortment of giveaways intended to lure businesses from costlier locations. There can be little analysis of whether those businesses deliver promised jobs or spur economic flywheels.

Conservatives can also be adept at bureaucratic tactics that suppress use of expensive government services. It is now widely understood that work requirements proposed for recipients of Medicaid are really a method to drive people off the rolls by burying them in time-wasting documentation. (Though it must be said that such tactics are used by so-called progressive governments to reduce use of expensive services as well.)

Moving the needle

If progressives and moderates are going to advocate for government programs and institutions, work has to be done. The last mayor to truly move the needle on government sclerosis in New York was Michael Bloomberg, who left office in 2013. He chose carefully from best practices that had worked for his eponymous media and data company (which I worked for as an architecture critic for several years) and applied them to increase the impact of government. He looked for the most talented people he could find and told them to do what it takes to deliver services better and more efficiently.

Those leaders attracted talent to the city that would previously have gone elsewhere. He required agencies in love with their silos to work together on issues in common and brought into the 21st century the city’s antiquated data management and IT infrastructure. At last, effectiveness could be measured!

Thus Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik Kahn could open up thinking on city streets by piloting programs, like protected bike lanes and other street improvements, with little more than paint. Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden could lead large-scale rezoning to accommodate more housing faster.

I found many people at DDC dedicated to the mission and to public service, but frequently frustrated by the sclerosis that prevailed in spite of Bloomberg efforts. These are people who know how to do the job better, and need to be asked how to do it. Other stakeholders are ready to help too. Making an effort to drill deeper into government dysfunction is utterly unsexy politically, but voters must insist on it. Once underway lots of low-hanging fruit will promptly appear in a well-managed restructuring. These victories that can then be used to leverage clout to address the most hidebound, most politically powerful resisters of change.