Why America Can't Build Things Anymore

It's Wednesday, September sixteenth. I was driving on 101 last week, somewhere between Redwood City and San Mateo, and I passed another construction zone that's been there since I moved to the Bay Area. Same orange cones. Same empty lane. Same sign that says "project completion: TBD" with a date that's been sticker-patched over twice. And it made me think about the California high-speed rail project, which was supposed to connect San Francisco to Los Angeles, whisking passengers between the two cities in under three hours. California voters approved it in 2008. The bond measure promised trains by 2020. It is now 2026. Not one segment of track is carrying passengers. Not one.

What makes this strange is the comparison. America used to be the country that built the biggest things in the world, faster than anyone thought possible. The Golden Gate Bridge, the Empire State Building, the Pentagon. Sixteen months, four years, one year and forty-five days. These are not ancient history. The people who built them are within living memory. And yet today, the average environmental review alone takes four and a half years. Before a single shovel breaks ground. Before construction even begins.

What happened? We didn't get worse at building things. We got better at stopping them.

Let me give you a quick tour of the speed run. Not because these numbers are fun trivia. Because they set the baseline for what this country could do when it decided something mattered.

March 1930. The Empire State Building breaks ground in Midtown Manhattan. The steel frame rises at a pace of four and a half stories per week. At its peak, the site employs three thousand workers, many of them Mohawk ironworkers who walked across narrow beams hundreds of feet in the air with no harnesses. The whole thing, all hundred and two stories, opens on May 1, 1931. One year and forty-five days from foundation to ribbon cutting. The design changed sixteen times during construction. They adjusted on the fly and kept building.

September 1941. The Army needs a single building to house the entire War Department, which is currently scattered across seventeen different buildings around Washington, D.C. They pick a site in Arlington, Virginia. Construction runs twenty-four hours a day, three shifts, under floodlights at night. Sixteen months later, the Pentagon is complete. Six and a half million square feet. Still the largest low-rise office building in the world. The project cost eighty-three million dollars, equivalent to about one point three six billion today. No lawsuits. No environmental review. They needed it, so they built it.

January 1933. Construction begins on the Golden Gate Bridge. The site is not a flat field. It's the entrance to San Francisco Bay, where the Pacific Ocean funnels through a mile-wide strait with currents strong enough to wreck construction trestles. Twice during the project, ships crashed into the temporary structures. They rebuilt and kept going. Four years later, in April 1937, the bridge opened. It was completed ahead of schedule and one point three million dollars under budget. The longest suspension bridge in the world at the time, and it was financed entirely with local bonds. No state or federal money.

Six years for the first transcontinental railroad, nineteen hundred miles across the Sierra Nevada and the Great Plains, built largely by hand with dynamite and pickaxes. Five years for Hoover Dam, completed two years ahead of schedule. The interstate highway system, forty-one thousand miles of road authorized in 1956, was substantially built out within twenty-five years. And those are just the headline projects. During World War II, the Army Corps of Engineers completed twenty-seven thousand military construction projects in four years. Twenty-seven thousand. That is not a typo.

The point is not that the past was better. The point is that the achievable was different.

In 1970, President Richard Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA (pronounced NEE-puh). The law was short and its premise was simple: before the federal government takes an action that might significantly affect the environment, it has to study what those effects would be. That sounds reasonable. Most people, then and now, would agree that bulldozing a wetland or choking a river with runoff is the kind of thing you should have to think about before you do it.

Here is what happened next.

NEPA created the environmental impact statement, or EIS. An agency proposing a project has to produce a document that analyzes the environmental consequences, considers alternatives, and invites public comment. In 1981, the Council on Environmental Quality estimated that an average EIS would take less than twelve months to complete. By 2022, the average EIS was taking four and a half years. The documents grew from about four hundred pages in the late 1970s to more than seventeen hundred pages, plus appendices. The direct paper cost isn't the problem. The time is.

And then comes litigation. Under NEPA, anyone can sue to challenge the adequacy of an environmental review. From 2013 to 2022, federal circuit courts heard about thirty-nine NEPA appeals per year, a fifty-six percent increase over the prior decade. A study of three hundred fifty-five major infrastructure projects between 2010 and 2018 found that twenty-eight percent faced litigation. The average delay from a legal challenge, even when the agency wins, is three point nine years. The agencies win seventy-one percent of the time. That means in the vast majority of cases, the lawsuit doesn't change the environmental outcome. It just adds four years.

Some of this litigation is good-faith environmental protection. But not all of it. Congressional testimony from 2024 documented environmental groups explicitly stating that their NEPA lawsuits are not solely intended to improve environmental outcomes. They are intended to delay and obstruct projects, often with the goal of preventing them from ever being built. Ten organizations were responsible for thirty-five percent of all NEPA challenges. Seventy-two percent of NEPA litigation was initiated by non-governmental organizations. The review process designed to inform decision-making had become a tool for opponents to stop decision-making entirely.

The numbers get more concrete when you look at what stops getting built. The average new major highway project in the United States now takes between nine and nineteen years from planning to completion. A Government Accountability Office study found that a six-lane, fifteen-mile divided highway in Texas took over fifteen years to complete, excluding planning. A fifteen-mile road. Fifteen years.

The cost of delay is not theoretical. One estimate found that a six-year delay on infrastructure projects across electricity transmission, power generation, and highway sectors cost the economy three point nine trillion dollars. That number is hard to verify, but the direction is not in dispute. Waiting costs money. Waiting forever costs a fortune.

Which brings me back to California high-speed rail.

The state created its High-Speed Rail Commission in 1993. That was thirty-three years ago. In 2008, voters approved a nearly ten billion dollar bond measure to fund an electric bullet train that would run from San Francisco to Los Angeles, with service starting by 2020. The projected cost at the time was around thirty-three billion dollars for the full system.

Construction did not break ground until 2016. That's eight years after the bond passed and twenty-three years after the commission was formed. The delays came from land acquisition, environmental reviews, and lawsuits. By the time construction actually started, the projected cost had already doubled.

Today, the full system from San Francisco to Los Angeles, if it ever gets built, is projected to cost more than one hundred twenty billion dollars. That pencils out to over two hundred million dollars per mile. To put that number in perspective: the projected cost of building just the one hundred seventy-one mile segment between Bakersfield and Merced now exceeds the entire 2008 projected cost of the full San Francisco to Los Angeles system. No segment of track is carrying passengers. The current timeline is for train service in the Central Valley by 2033, twenty-five years after voters approved the bond.

This is not just one badly managed project. The same pattern plays out in smaller ways everywhere. The average utility-scale solar project in the United States spends four years of a six-year total timeline just on planning and permitting. Transmission lines needed to move renewable energy from where the sun shines and wind blows to where people live can take a decade or more in permitting alone. In New England, pipeline constraints caused by permitting deadlocks have left the region paying some of the highest natural gas prices in the world, and at times, the region has been forced to burn dirtier fuels because cleaner supply routes couldn't get approved.

The thing about these delays is that they don't just cost money. They change what gets built. When the cost of getting through the process is measured in years and millions of dollars, only the biggest players with the deepest pockets and the most patience can play. Small projects die on the vine. Big projects become so expensive they get scaled back or cancelled. The infrastructure that does get built is concentrated in the hands of whoever can survive the gauntlet.

The people who built the Empire State Building worked under conditions we would consider barbaric today. Officially, five workers died during construction of the Golden Gate Bridge. Fourteen died building the Empire State Building, and unofficial numbers are thought to be much higher. Nearly one hundred workers died building Hoover Dam. We should not romanticize that. The decision to protect safety, to study environmental impact, to let communities have a voice, those were good decisions.

But we also made it possible for a single lawsuit to delay a project by four years even when the plaintiff loses. We made it possible for a process that was supposed to take twelve months to routinely take four and a half years. And we have been living with those choices for decades, watching the things we said we wanted to build take longer and cost more than the things our grandparents built by hand, with worse tools, in a fraction of the time.

Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you tomorrow.