Jeffrey R. Liebman, a former Obama administration official,
authored a prominent article in the June 22 issue of the
Wall Street Journal lambasting Republicans in Congress for
blocking President Obama’s plans to spend billions of dollars
on infrastructure projects to create jobs for the unemployed.
As he writes, “Congress has failed to act on the president’s plan
to put construction workers back on the job rebuilding our roads,
bridges, and airports.”
This is a charade. The day is long past when spending on public
works and infrastructure can pull the economy out of recession in a
timely way. By the time such spending is ready to come on line, the
recession is likely to be long past.
To see why this is so, one need look no further than to the
Keystone XL Project, the proposed 1800-mile pipeline project
designed to carry Canadian crude oil to various refining and
distribution hubs in the United States. The Obama administration
has blocked this ambitious infrastructure project, even though it
would promote American energy independence and create an estimated
20,000 new jobs, with additional income and employment for
businesses along the pipeline route.
The pipeline is now embroiled in an administrative controversy
over whether or not it will cause harm to the environment. The
State Department completed a review last year that cleared the
pipeline to go forward, but this decision was contested by
environmental groups that claimed it would cause environmental
damage and would accelerate global warming by encouraging the
consumption of more oil. The Obama administration is now reviewing
the matter once again, promising to hand down a decision in 2013,
conveniently after the presidential election. If the Obama
administration was really serious about “infrastructure jobs,” then
it would have approved the pipeline last year when the first
environmental review was completed.
What is true of the Keystone Pipeline is likely to be true of
other ambitious public works projects. Even where there is
political agreement that a project should go forward, the extensive
review and permitting process now in play means that it can take
several years from the time a project is conceived to the time it
can actually begin. President Obama is well aware of this, as he
discovered to his dismay a few years ago that stimulus funds could
not be put to immediate use because there were few “shovel ready”
projects on which to spend it. The regulatory burden is one of the
main reasons why America’s infrastructure is in disrepair or out of
date, why highways are clogged, flights are always behind schedule,
and bridges are overdue for renovation or replacement.
For more than forty years Democrats have been at war with
themselves, on the one hand demanding funds for public works
projects and on the other passing regulations to make it impossible
for those projects to go forward. Today activists can draw upon a
welter of laws and regulations to block the construction of roads,
bridges, dams, and airports, from the Clean Air Act to the Clean
Water Act to the Endangered Species Act to the Coral Reef
Conservation Act. The National Environmental Policy Act (1970)
created a regulatory process under which environmental assessments
and environmental impact statements must be prepared and approved
for federally funded infrastructure projects. The Keystone Pipeline
has been held up because federal authorities and environmental
groups dispute the accuracy of the environmental impact statement
that cleared the project to go forward. Under the law, they
can take their objections to court; if they find a friendly judge,
they can hold up a project for years. Often a project can be
effectively killed if activists can manage to hold it up long
enough. This is what they hope to accomplish with the Keystone
pipeline.
Anyone familiar with large public works project can cite many
examples of projects that were held up or cancelled due to
regulatory roadblocks. Officials in New York State have been
working on plans for more than a decade to replace the Tappan Zee
Bridge across the Hudson River, and are still nowhere
near overcoming the regulatory hurdles that still stand in the
way of the project.
Every redesign of the project requires another set of
environmental reviews. It may take another decade before work can
even begin on a new bridge, even though in the 1950s it took just
four years from the time the current bridge was conceived to the
time it was opened.
Liberals often point to FDR’s public works programs as a
successful model for what might be accomplished today in the
construction and repair of roads and bridges. They ignore the fact
that they have put in place monumental hurdles to public works
projects that FDR never imagined. Until President Obama and his
supporters address that reality, their talk about public works
and infrastructure projects can be written off as a political
charade.
