Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
Today’s infrastructure doesn’t require a whole lot of picks and shovels.
This article appears in the September/October 2021 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
When Congress or a city or state allocates funds to build something, they generally focus on three-dimensional objects: roads, bridges, wind turbines, reservoirs, airports, rails, lead pipe replacements. They neglect the all-important fourth dimension: time. Though Einstein demonstrated that time alters space, time is often a missing element when governments set out to build things. Government projects, in short, are too Newtonian.
You’d think more politicians would realize this, as they all have a kind of performance deadline of their own to meet: going before voters every two or four or six years. Life being unfair, these deadlines pose a greater challenge for liberals (like those who’ve pledged to build back better) than they do for right-wingers, whose pledge to stand athwart history hollering “Stop!” doesn’t obligate them to build anything more than diversionary public anger.
As I write, Democrats in Congress and the White House are still crafting and negotiating over landmark infrastructure and social welfare legislation. Their electoral prospects hinge not merely on passing these bills, but on getting these projects and programs visibly up and running before the 2022 and 2024 elections.
There’s no mystery why major infrastructure projects and policy expansions take time.
Unfortunately, the Democrats’ record over the past several decades is mixed, and in the early jousting over the Build Back Better agenda, that legacy continues.
Extending Medicare to cover dental care—a popular-vote winner if ever there was one—may take until 2028, we’re told, though the administration is pushing for an earlier activation date. Child care subsidies are set to phase in over six years. Medicare negotiation with pharmaceutical companies over prescription drug prices won’t begin until 2025. As to the bipartisan infrastructure legislation, one admittedly conservative estimate has it that no more than $20 billion will be spent by the end of 2022.
This means that Democrats won’t have a lot they can point to before the midterm elections.
For context, when the Democrats originally enacted Medicare in 1965—a much bigger undertaking than any of these programs—it was up and running within one year.
There’s no mystery why major infrastructure projects and policy expansions take time, of course. The expansion of child care and creation of universal pre-K in the reconciliation legislation, for example, will require the recruitment and training of a new workforce and the upskilling of many in the existing workforce. The recruitment part requires setting pay and benefits at a level commensurate with the needs and expectations of millions of workers, which is certainly not the case today. The training and upskilling of workers also requires a significant expansion of the teacher training workforce and facilities.
As for infrastructure, progressives need to grapple with their own handiwork. The expansion of government frequently collides head-on with the procedures of clean government that hears out the concerns of stakeholders. This was not the case during the New Deal, when Franklin Roosevelt’s administration managed to put millions to work on public projects in a matter of weeks.
In 2010, reporting on why President Obama’s 2009 $787 billion stimulus was taking so long to roll out, I spoke with Laura Chick, the Democratic former Los Angeles city controller, whom Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (a Republican) had appointed to oversee how the $85 billion allotted to California was being spent. It was being spent, she said, slowly. “You can’t just build a new bridge,” Chick said. “Environmental-impact reviews, historic-preservation safeguards, unionization of government workers—these are good things, but they’ve changed the way government can operate. You have to open up the decision to community input. It [all] makes it harder to deal with an economic crisis,” which the nation was still experiencing in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown.
Not only federal projects are delayed by complexity. New York City’s Second Avenue subway line was first proposed in 1920; construction of the first phase (running from 65th Street to 105th Street) began in 1972, stopped in 1975 due to the city’s near bankruptcy, resumed in 2007, and was completed in 2017. In California, voters approved, by a 2-to-1 margin, a $7.1 billion bond measure in 2014 to build reservoirs and other water storage projects to help the state grapple with its ever more severe droughts. Three and a half years later, the state approved eight (now seven) projects,
iStockphoto
the first of which won’t be up and running until 2024, despite the state’s accelerating desertification. California’s high-speed rail system, approved by bond measure at the ballot in 2008, is slated to complete first-stage construction in 2023, and then only between the bustling metropolises of Bakersfield and Madera. The timeline for Los Angeles and San Francisco is indefinite.
The failure to factor in timeliness struck one Obama administration official to whom I spoke as a failure of liberal imagination. “I kept hearing that we had lots of projects that were shovel-ready,” he said. “But they weren’t. We have think tanks that make a compelling case for Keynesian stimulus. What we need, it turns out, is a think tank that tells us how to actually do a stimulus, how we can get the dollars out there now.”
COMPLEXITY IS A DELAYING FACTOR not only for infrastructure but for the implementation and distribution of social benefits. And in social policy, complexity usually takes the form of means-tested eligibility requirements. For example, existing federal child care subsidies are so narrowly targeted and underfunded that even most eligible families don’t receive them. According to a pre-pandemic report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, only 1 in 6 eligible children actually receive assistance.
Though the Biden administration and virtually the entire Democratic congressional delegation want to enact more universal social benefits and put an end to such inefficient and scattershot programs, the handful of Democratic holdouts seem to prefer that inefficiency. On a recent Sunday talk show, West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin criticized the Child Tax Credit that Democrats had enacted for a one-year period in pandemic relief legislation in March, proposing instead both means testing and work requirements to narrow eligibility.
Even without Manchin’s assistance, the nation recently hit a new low in inefficient distribution of desperately needed assistance in the failure of its renter relief program. Though the government appropriated $25 billion last winter and an additional $21.5 billion last March to enable renters who’d lost income due to the pandemic to pay their back rent, just 12 percent of those funds had been distributed by midsummer. In this case, the federal government delegated the task of reaching out to renters and landlords to state and local governments that had little to no capacity to do that. Most had to construct rental assistance programs from scratch, and some (read: red states) had no particular inclination to help out renters at all. Adding to the obstacles, the feds also required renters to fill out a long and bewildering application to establish eligibility, and landlords could even deny the funds.
The failure of rental relief highlights two systemic obstacles that public programs currently face. The first is federalism itself: In delegating to states and municipalities, the feds entrust their programs to governments that often lack the capacity and will to implement them. The resistance of Republican-run state governments to expand Medicaid eligibility despite the federal government’s covering at least 90 percent of the cost makes a clear case that when the feds want something done, they should do it themselves.
The second obstacle is simple outreach capacity. Just about the only organizations in American history that could have effectively located and reached out to tenants in need of assistance haven’t been governmental, they’ve been political. In the Irish precincts of Manhattan from 1870 through 1930, Tammany’s ward heelers, if they were doing their jobs conscientiously, could likely have identified those families in need. In the New York housing projects established by the clothing and garment unions in the 1930s and ’40s, left-wing party members could have performed analogous services. In some cities, this task has been taken up today by community groups that are underfunded and overburdened.
By contrast, we should take a quick look at social benefit programs that have succeeded splendidly. The most popular social program the United States has ever enacted is Social Security. Its success is due not only to addressing the individual needs of seniors, to bolstering the senior (and thus aggregate) purchasing power on which the economy depends, and to the fact that seniors have presumably earned it through a lifetime of work, but also to its absence of the kind of eligibility hurdles that have hamstrung so many means-tested programs. No one has to jump hurdles to establish eligibility; one only has to age sufficiently. For this reason, the administrative costs incurred by Social Security are minuscule. Universality guarantees efficiency and timeliness.
EVEN THOUGH WE HAVE NO THINK TANK specifically working on timely delivery of services and construction of infrastructure, as the Obama administration official wished for, the Biden administration (for which that official now works) is cognizant of how delayed delivery undercut Obama’s achievements and helped doom the Democrats’ political prospects. As the failure of rental relief demonstrates, they haven’t sidestepped all of the same pitfalls, but by moving closer to universality in a number of their proposals, and by shortening some infrastructure approval processes, they’re at least striving to sidestep some of them. For example, the infrastructure bill amends the National Environmental Policy Act so that the average time an environmental review will take is reduced from 4.5 years to 2.5.
Most importantly, by mandating COVID vaccinations for most American workers, President Biden has demonstrated that the government can transcend its usual limitations with timely and as-universal-as-possible policy when conditions demand it. He’s also demonstrated that, as with Social Security, timely and universal programs can command wide public support.
The Democrats’ agenda is frequently being compared to the New Deal, and there’s a lesson from that period that Biden and his congressional allies should heed. To deal with the catastrophe of the Depression, President Roosevelt persuaded Congress to establish an unprecedented public-works program—the Public Works Administration (PWA)—that in time would build the Boulder and Bonneville Dams, the Triborough and Oakland Bay Bridges, and two of the aircraft carriers that stopped the Japanese offensive in the Battle of Midway. All these projects took years to complete, however, and when his aide Harry Hopkins told Roosevelt that many thousands of Americans would starve in the winter of 1933–1934, Roosevelt took some PWA finds and diverted them to new labor-intensive work programs that didn’t require years to develop. Between mid-November of 1933 and the spring of 1934, the Civil Works Administration, under Hopkins’s leadership, put 4.3 million Americans (in what was then a nation of 125 million) to work on federal payrolls, paving roads, building schools and post offices and airports. For most of the workers, this was largely pick-and-shovel work, but it helped build the country and helped save lives.
Today’s infrastructure doesn’t require a whole lot of picks and shovels. But this two-speed approach to delivering programs provides a model for today’s Democrats, and a starting point for that as-yet-unborn think tank that will add the dimension of time to liberalism’s goals and metrics.
These are not new problems. In considering whether to be or not to be, Hamlet lists “the law’s delay” as one reason why life can become unbearable. Whatever infrastructure, services, and rights this generation of Democrats creates or augments, they should take care that once enacted, the law does not delay them.
