Building What?

At Reason.com Peter Suderman gives his assessment of the Biden presidency:

Over the last four years, President Biden supported the investment of billions of dollars of taxpayer money in infrastructure—and, in particular, high-tech green energy infrastructure such as high-speed rail, rural broadband, and electric vehicle charging stations.

And what happened was: He didn’t build that.

The money was authorized, but the projects didn’t come to completion. As Politico reported last month in an overview of Biden’s signature green energy infrastructure projects, “a $42 billion expansion of broadband internet service has yet to connect a single household. Bureaucratic haggling, equipment shortages and logistical challenges mean a $7.5 billion effort to install electric vehicle chargers from coast to coast has so far yielded just 47 stations in 15 states.” According to Politico, Congress authorized more than $1 trillion in spending for Biden’s major climate, clean energy, and infrastructure programs, but more than half of it “has yet to be obligated or is not yet available for agencies to spend.” Many of the big projects that received either subsidies or tax breaks under Biden are still essentially imaginary, and some may not happen at all, depending on what President-elect Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress choose to pursue.

Even projects that Biden himself is personally invested in haven’t paid off: Biden has long subscribed to a romantic fantasy of passenger rail, and his administration sent more than $3 billion to further fund California’s long-delayed high-speed rail system. The rail project was supposed to connect Los Angeles with San Francisco, but it’s currently years behind schedule and $100 billion over budget—and is now struggling to complete a much shorter, much less useful line between Merced and Bakersville, which are not exactly global economic hubs. There is currently no completion date, or really any actionable plan at all, to actually connect L.A. and San Francisco. Biden threw billions at a worthless project, and America got nothing for it.

Mr. Suderman contrasts that performance with that of the private sector:

The contrast with the private sector is revealing. The most notable train project in the United States during Biden’s tenure wasn’t California’s doomed high-speed rail, or some Amtrak upgrade that justified the billions this administration sent their way, but the Brightline in Florida. For sheer wow factor, the biggest engineering project of the Biden tenure was almost certainly SpaceX’s reusable rocket catch. Yes, SpaceX has significant business with the government, but it’s fundamentally a private enterprise, operating with private goals and direction. America can still build big things. But Biden’s top-down, bureaucratic approach has failed to do so.

I’ve already provided my explanation of why the United States is realizing so little in the way of outputs from the inputs the federal government is providing: it’s the spending that’s important to those arguing for these expenditures and those administering them not the results.

The spending alone may be sufficient for the bureaucrats and advocates of these programs but the country actually needs material results. Once upon a time the United States was able to complete major projects like these on a timely basis. Have we lost that ability or is it just the desire that we have lost?