Process May Not be the Villain—Failing to do Politics Definitely Is

Sometimes process blocks action. Sometimes it’s a political sign.

One pillar of an emerging “abundance” argument is that infrastructure takes too long to build in the U.S. because of too much permitting, too much planning, too many meetings. This argument rightly applies to energy, to housing, and many other issues. I’m sympathetic—but that diagnosis skips a step. Politics?

We rarely ask:

Was there ever the political will to do the thing in the first place?

Too often, we collapse political problems and process problems—and in doing so, we misdiagnose what’s actually going wrong.

Stephanie Pollack—former acting administrator of the Federal Highway Administration and, more importantly, the CEO of the Massachusetts Department of Transportation—spelled out very similar dynamics clearly in a recent interview with Santi Ruiz at his excellent Statecraft podcast and Substack:

“But the actual problem is that no one is willing to make a decision and find the money. Until someone is willing to make a decision — either yes we’re building it and I can tell you how we’ll pay for it, or no we’re not — then planning and permitting and public engagement can go on and on for decades.

Then, when people look backwards, they say, ‘Oh, the planning, permitting and public engagement is why it took decades,’ as opposed to the unwillingness to make a go/no-go decision.

But really, the lack of money is why it took decades, and during those decades, we did a lot of planning, permitting, and public engagement to keep the project alive.”

Pollack cuts through the noise: process isn’t the cause of delay when there’s no decision to move forward. Sometimes, it’s the only thing keeping a project alive while the politics catch up.

This helps explain a core weakness in parts of the abundance movement—and in Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s recent book. It skips the politics.

For example, my colleagues at the Foundation for American Innovation have made this argument in publications like Commonplace and The New Atlantis, among others. Conservatives are building in places and using political power to make it easier to build in the future. Indeed, FAI is advocating for using our current political power to limit NEPA review, something that some abundance liberals such as Nick Bagley are supporting.

We suspect that blue states aren’t building precisely because abundance liberals don’t have the political support.

I confess that when I read Klein, Thompson, and—perhaps even more so—Marc Dunkelman, I hear a celebration of expertise and a plea (or even a demand) that politics ratify technocratic conclusions. But as my colleague Robert Bellafiore has argued in The American Conservative, we are no longer in an era that defaults to the authority of experts. The abundance agenda often assumes elite competence will be enough to move the public—but today’s politics has already rejected that premise.

Also from the left, there’s concern that abundance advocates underplay politics. As Henry Farrell writes:

“Abundance has little explicit to say about democratic contestation and the gaining and losing of power. The book invokes the importance of the public interest (as opposed to the manifold interests of groups) without properly explaining how to figure out what that is.”

We know the answer for figuring out what the public interest is: politics. For those of us on the abundance right, our lesson from Massachusetts or California is that the interminable process in those states is hiding the real fact: they don’t have the political coalition to get it done.

Pollack served under a Republican governor, Charlie Baker. Maybe that’s not a coincidence. In the end, it wasn’t process that made Massachusetts move—it was politics.