I’ve been thinking about something that Jake Sullivan, President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, said in a post-election interview: “The president has been operating on a time horizon measured in decades, while the political cycle is measured in four years.”
What we’re seeing now is that this was a false choice. There is no way to cleave the policy of the next decade from the outcome of the next election. If you lose power, your carefully constructed set of bills and international alliances can be turned to cinder by your successor. If it is true that Biden believed he was choosing the politics of posterity over the policies Americans would feel before the election, then he chose wrong.
But I don’t think it was a choice. Delay has become the default setting of American government. The 2021 infrastructure law was supposed to pump hundreds of billions into roads, bridges, rural broadband, electric vehicle chargers. By 2024, few of its projects were finished or installed. That wasn’t because Biden or his team wanted to run for re-election on the backs of news releases rather than ribbon cuttings. But the administration didn’t make the changes necessary to deliver on a time frame the public could feel. Many members of Biden’s staff now bitterly regret it. That includes Sullivan, who described his experience as “profoundly radicalizing.”
“Whether it’s infrastructure or submarines or energy generation or transmission lines or chip fabs — it is crazy the extent to which we have clogged up our delivery,” Sullivan told me. “Part of it is laws and regulations. Part of it is the self-deterrence of caution. Part of it is litigation. Part of it is complacency. Part of it is bureaucracy. But what I encountered in my four years as national security adviser was a constant and growing set of obstacles to getting anything done fast. It was a huge frustration. Huge.”
A swifter government is possible. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Medicare program into law on July 30, 1965; it began covering seniors a year later, on July 1, 1966. Compare that with the Biden administration’s Medicare reforms. In 2022, as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration gave Medicare the authority to bargain down prices on 10 drugs; those prices won’t go into effect until … 2026. As Mike Konczal, a former economic adviser to President Biden, noted, that is “just in time for President Trump to take credit for them going into the midterms.”
The difference between those two processes is, well, process. Over decades, Democrats and Republicans alike came to embrace the virtues of delay. Delay allows for the gathering of information, the input of affected communities, the thinking through of possible consequences and fidelity to process — and all of that, together, leads to better policy. Or so the thinking went.
That kind of thinking informed new processes at every level of American government. Our environmental laws use reviews and lawsuits to force the federal government to slow down and thoroughly consider all the possible consequences of its actions; our regulatory processes use notice-and-comment periods and create space for challenges to make sure voices can be heard; our local governments create space and time for residents to challenge the construction of housing in their communities until it conforms to their standards; Congress builds in complex planning procedures and review requirements to ensure taxpayer money is not lost to waste or fraud or abuse.
But there is an argument against delay, too, and it is one that I am hearing more and more Democrats make. “We do not see delay as a form of government waste — which it is,” Representative Josh Harder, a California Democrat, told me. “We see this with costs. All of these projects are just going to cost way more money. But politically it has a huge cost as well. It breeds the cynicism and apathy that, to me, really characterizes our politics today. Getting something done quickly that addresses at least a little bit of the problem is better than spending years designing the perfect solution that never actually happens.”
Speed connects voters with the consequences of their votes. To survive, liberal democracy does not just need to deliver; it needs to deliver fast enough that voters know who to thank — or blame — for what they’re getting. Right now, it is delivering so slowly that the lines of accountability are confused. The Biden administration believed in the politics of delivery. But the bills it passed will complete projects so slowly that it will be Trump, or even his successor, who benefits politically.
It’s an experience that has infuriated many who served in the Biden White House or who voted for its signature bills — particularly as they have watched Trump and Elon Musk use the yearning for government efficiency as an excuse to burn much of the federal government to the ground.
I recently had my own awkward experience with this.
I’ve spent the last month or so on tour for “Abundance,” the book I wrote with The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson. “Abundance” is in no small part about the consequences of delay in Democratic governance. One example I’ve come back to repeatedly in events and interviews is the rural broadband program that passed as part of that 2021 infrastructure law: $42 billion to connect tens of millions of Americans to broadband. By the end of Biden’s term, the administration had nothing to show for it. Was it really impossible for a signature program begun in Biden’s first year to have delivered its benefits by the end of his fourth year?
In March, Sarah Morris, a former deputy administrator of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, testified before Congress in a bid to save the project. She laid out the 14-phase process that the broadband program was following — a 14-phase process that, by March of 2025, only three of the 56 states and territories that had applied for the money had completed.
I read the process out to Jon Stewart, on his podcast, and he reacted with astonishment. The clip was then repeatedly promoted on X by Musk, who thought it was a delightful advertisement of government inefficiency — and who has his own rooting interest here, as the Trump administration is seeking to open the program to Musk’s Starlink service.
I find Musk’s efforts with DOGE particularly repellent because I so firmly believe in the need for the thing that it pretends to be. I would like to see a government that efficiently delivers services to citizens; DOGE, by firing I.R.S. and Social Security employees en masse, is going to throw those agencies into chaos and cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars in missed tax collections. I would like to see a government that more efficiently and ambitiously funds scientific research; DOGE, in gutting our scientific agencies and lawlessly firing more or less everyone who has ever written or spoken the word “diversity,” is going to hollow out the very functions of government I want to supercharge.
DOGE seeks not efficiency but control: It is a purge of the bureaucracy meant to give Trump, in his second term, the control over the administrative state he believes he lacked in his first term. And here I was, giving Musk ammunition for his effort.
This did not thrill liberals, and I got some calls from members of the Biden administration who felt my comments heaped too much blame on the administration. That was fair: Portions of that 14-stage process were insisted upon by congressional Republicans. And the reasoning Republicans gave for those complex requirements was that they feared waste and overspending. This is a common way Republicans gum up the government: by making it waste dollars and time in lengthy paperwork processes in which it tries to prove it will not waste dollars or time.
Still, what I found, as I talked to various people who’d been part of the broadband program, was that much of the process was worse than I’d known — one participant estimated he’d wasted 40 to 50 percent of his time on internal government requirements he judged irrelevant to the project — and they were desperate to see some lessons learned.
Bharat Ramamurti, who served as deputy director of the National Economic Council under Biden, was among those irked by my comments. So when we talked, I was surprised by how much frustration poured out of him.
“We had too much legacy and too little immediacy in our policy approach,” Ramamurti told me. “Look at everything after the American Rescue Plan — infrastructure, CHIPS, I.R.A. — all of it was long-term focused. The most off-the-charts popular thing we did was cap out-of-pocket costs on Medicare prescription drugs. We passed that in 2022, and it went into effect in 2025! It frustrated me to no end.”
In the Trump administration’s view of politics, the “deep state” serves Democrats and obstructs Republicans. But I am struck by how often I hear Democrats describe their own fights with the bureaucracies they supposedly control.
“A huge amount of time I spent in government was spent on trying to overcome some of these career staff objections and get things done more quickly,” Ramamurti went on to say. “It takes a presidential level of focus on nearly a daily basis that this is a priority and that the attendant risks are worth taking on. If people criticize us for sending money to the wrong people or because the website went down, the president needs to be willing to explain it.”
When I asked Sullivan a version of this question — where is all this resistance to speed coming from in a government you supposedly control? — he put it like this: “It takes a couple dozen people to say yes to make something happen, and it only takes one person to say no to stop that thing from happening. The bias is always toward no. And you might ask: Why can’t the president just override the no? That’s where we as an administration were intensely scrupulous about process, propriety, mindful of the role of the agencies, and so there was a degree of self-deterrence that was almost culturally built in.”
This came to a particular head in the Biden administration because it, much more so than the Obama or first Trump administration, was trying to build real things in the real world — infrastructure, solar and wind farms, battery manufacturing plants, semiconductor fabs, and much more. As hard as it is to change Medicare rules, it is far harder to build interstate transmission lines.
“We had an agenda to build, and that meant we hit the obstacles to building, and those were very radicalizing,” Sullivan said. “It’s the sludge of so many different built-up processes, regulations and ways of doing business. You try to build anything, and you’re stepping into quicksand, and the harder you struggle against it, the more you get sucked into it.”
Over and over again, Biden officials would tell me about laws they had managed to get exemptions from. The broadband provisions of the infrastructure bill were exempted from the Administrative Procedures Act; the bulk of semiconductor investments from the CHIPS Act were exempted from the National Environmental Policy Act. If you need to seek this many exemptions from the existing laws for your signature projects, I asked, doesn’t that suggest you should try to change the laws themselves?
Here, Sullivan sounded resigned. “To actually change the National Environmental Policy Act itself — how many times a year do we change major foundational pieces of legislation in major and consequential ways? It’s extremely rare. You can take something like the child online privacy law that has something like 80 percent support in polls, and they can’t even pass that. We have lost the capacity to legislate in this country in a meaningful way. Major legislation is such a heavy lift and so easily blocked that it falls to chief executives to use whatever exclusions or workarounds they can muster.”
But it’s not as if the Biden administration tried to change these laws and failed. It never tried. Biden never gave a speech saying what his top staff members now say to me so freely. His administration never released a proposal for how to rewrite the laws and rebuild the state to accomplish its goals. Maybe the next Democratic administration will.
In March, Brian Deese, who led the National Economic Council under Biden, published a blistering piece in Foreign Affairs called “Why America Struggles to Build.” It is, for my money, one of the most important essays any Democrat has written since the election. It is both an admission that the Biden administration failed to fix what ailed America and a credible sketch of a liberal approach to doing just that. Deese wrote:
Building physical capacity — housing, energy generation, transmission lines, factories, data centers — is more critical to the U.S. economy today than it has been for decades. After 15 years of insufficient housing construction, the lack of affordable homes is lowering the country’s annual economic output, potentially by hundreds of billions of dollars. After 25 years of stagnant investment in energy networks, an inability to meet rising electricity demands risks increased consumer costs and more frequent blackouts. And for decades, the United States has failed to properly invest in the industrial capabilities necessary to build important infrastructure, including semiconductor factories, nuclear power plants and critical supply chains. In the process, it has ceded some technological ground to China and other adversaries at a time of intensifying global competition over new technologies.
Deese embraces what might be called an “all of the above” strategy for making it easier for America to build and for the government to act. He proposes more spending and less regulation, attacks on concentrated corporate power and outdated environmental laws, using federal money to force states to allow more housing and infrastructure even as he insists that Democrats confront the parts of their own coalition that cling to the tools of delay.
And he recognizes, crucially, that all of this is within our power to achieve. The proof is that we achieved it before. These laws and rules and regulations that obstruct what we need to do today were solutions to the problems we faced in the past. In mid-20th century America, we really were building too recklessly, with too little consideration for the damage being inflicted on the environment and communities. Passing these laws was not easy — there were special interests and truculent members of Congress in the 1970s, too — but it was done, and it worked.
“Previous decades of environmentalism showed that a well-designed regulatory architecture can lead to profound change,” Deese wrote. “Today, however, progress requires flipping the script and creating a regulatory architecture that encourages building more, not less.”
That does not mean Democrats need to embrace either the means or the goals of DOGE. The fact that a patient needs surgery doesn’t mean he would benefit from a series of random puncture wounds. But Democrats need to embrace their own goals — the things they keep promising the public they will deliver — and then figure out how to deliver them, fast. And that will require change, and a relentless focus, that comes from the top. The next Democratic president should keep a framed reminder on the Resolute Desk: Speed is progressive.
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Ezra Klein joined Opinion in 2021. Previously, he was the founder, editor in chief and then editor at large of Vox; the host of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show”; and the author of “Why We’re Polarized.” Before that, he was a columnist and editor at The Washington Post, where he founded and led the Wonkblog vertical. He is on Threads.
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