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Why America Can't Build Anymore

Sol Meridian EditorialSeptember 22, 202524 min

Every empire tells time with its roads. Rome had milestones; we have press releases. In 2021, Congress passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law—a vault of money large enough to make accountants need a hammock. The numbers are real; the cranes are not imaginary.

What America Actually Built After the Infrastructure Law—and Why the Road Still Wanders

By a regulated optimist who grades with a pencil, votes with both hands, and still believes maps should tell the truth.

I. Orange Cones at Noon

Every empire tells time with its roads. Rome had milestones; we have press releases. In 2021, Congress passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law—a vault of money large enough to make accountants need a hammock. The White House now advertises over 66,000 projects announced and more than $568 billion in funding "out the door." The numbers are real; the cranes are not imaginary. But the sensation in many American cities is stranger: a kind of national jet lag where the news says we're moving and the street says we're waiting.

I do not mean the law failed. I mean that a country organized around detours—legal, procedural, political—will produce as many delays as bridges. If you want to understand why Americans doubt their state yet still want it to save them, take a long walk past a closed sidewalk.

II. What the Law Promised, What It Couldn't

The law did three enormous things: poured money into classical civil works (roads, bridges, water), launched modern systems (broadband, grid hardening, EV charging), and tried to thread a new equity politics through the old arteries (set-asides for disadvantaged communities). The Department of Transportation's own running ledger shows tens of billions in 2025 formula funds alone hitting state accounts—$62 billion for that fiscal year's highways and related programs. The scale is Eisenhower-large. But scale collides with the structure of American federalism: money routes through fifty different procurement cultures, hundreds of metropolitan planning organizations, and a judicial branch now more skeptical of agency discretion than at any time since the New Deal.

If you're looking for a single moral, here it is: we have funded ambition into a system designed for caution.

III. The EV Parable (or, Chargers in Theory, Traffic in Practice)

Nothing illustrates the collision like EV charging. The law set aside $7.5 billion to seed a national network under the NEVI program, with the romantic promise of fast chargers every 50 miles. The reality by end of 2024: 44 NEVI-funded public stations actually open across 12 states, according to a nonpartisan congressional brief. By mid-2025, GAO counted ≈219,000 public charging ports nationwide—most funded privately or by other programs—while fewer than 400 ports came from the flagship federal effort, a figure Reuters splashed like cold water. In parallel, private coalitions (GM–EVgo–Pilot) have pushed ahead to 130 highway locations on their own timetable. One lesson is banal—permitting is hard—but the sharper lesson is constitutional: when a judiciary pares back agency latitude and an administration changes, whole networks can stall between memos.

If you own a gas station, you buy pumps and pour concrete. If you're a state DOT installing DC fast chargers with federal dollars, you must choose connectors, uptime guarantees, payment standards, data sharing, labor rules, civil-rights compliance, and a dozen other requirements that make the future salvageable. It is right to do it carefully. It is fatal to do it slowly. The NEVI story is not a scandal; it is an MRI of our institutional metabolism.

IV. Texas: Freedom at 2 A.M. (Grid Edition)

February 2021 turned Texas into a parable told by icicles. The ERCOT grid shed around 20,000 megawatts in rolling blackouts—the largest manually controlled load-shedding event in U.S. history—because plants and gas supply chains were never winterized for a polar breath that did not read the marketing. FERC and NERC's postmortem repeated an older refrain: weatherization is not optional in a warming world that still produces cold. Those are engineering words with constitutional shadows. We have chosen a regulatory culture where markets blush at mandates until physics writes them. The infrastructure law can fund sensors and resilience; it cannot teach a state to love redundancy.

Texas is not a punchline. It is the syllabus. A modern country needs a grid that treats "rare" as a planning input. The law gets us to the store; state policy decides whether we buy batteries or excuses.

V. California: The Train That Is Both Necessary and Embarrassed

California's high-speed rail is the secular equivalent of a cathedral: built in public, argued about in three languages, and essential to civic self-respect. The 2024 Business Plan reads like a progress report from a patient that keeps walking after surgeries—kilometers of guideway built in the Central Valley, stations advancing, cost ranges revised with Talmudic care, and a sequence to Merced–Bakersfield revenue service before the spine stretches to the coasts. The plan is serious, transparent, and haunted by the arithmetic of American megaprojects. The law has delivered grants; the state has delivered concrete; the culture has delivered jokes. All three are true at once.

We could say: other countries build faster. We could also say: they have national planning and less litigation. The U.S. chose to disperse veto points like confetti; the confetti looks festive until you sweep it for a decade.

VI. Louisiana: Where the Map Leaks

Coastal Louisiana is a slow emergency. Since the 1930s, the state has lost about 2,000 square miles of land—an exodus of earth to the Gulf. The 2023 Coastal Master Plan projects that, under worse scenarios, another 3,000 square miles could go in fifty years without action. The state has a nation-leading plan: sediment diversions, marsh creation, levees. The infrastructure law funds parts of the armory; climate physics supplies the clock. If you want to see federalism without romance, watch engineers defending Barataria Bay while the Mississippi remembers the route it took before we trained it. Every appropriation is a prayer; every lawsuit is a homily.

Louisiana is often treated as a lesson for Louisiana. It is a lesson for New York, Miami, Norfolk, and the Delta counties that do not have parades to remind Congress where the water will go.

VII. How We Got This Way (Five Bad Habits)

  1. The Cult of the One-Off: We still design governance as if every bridge were a boutique suit. Countries that build quickly create kits—specs, contracts, environmental templates—that travel from site to site. We reinvent the wheel and then sue it.

  2. The Tyranny of the Tiny Veto: Our environmental review is morally justified and operationally baroque. When courts trim deference to agencies, they inadvertently hand more leverage to whoever can afford delay. The loser is not the developer; it is the calendar.

  3. Short Halftime in a Long Game: Funding cycles run in two-year political beats; infrastructure lives on thirty-year rhythms. The law injected multi-year cash; culture recycles attention every quarter.

  4. State Capacity as Afterthought: You cannot manage federal billions with county staffing of dozens. Project delivery is a trade; we have treated it like seasonal work.

  5. Metrics that Photograph the Ribbon, Not the Road: We count dollars announced and groundbreakings. We undercount uptime, avoided emissions, and reduced travel-time inequality. Announcements gratify; operations civilize.

VIII. What Actually Worked (and Why)

These successes were not mysterious. They were bureaucratically boring—and therefore replicable.

IX. The Foreign Policy Mirror You Didn't Expect in a Pothole Essay

You asked me to keep the Hemisphere in view—the way we treat Latin America differently than Europe, and how public ignorance licenses it. Here's the unromantic join: infrastructure is foreign policy with concrete. We perform diligence for Paris and patience for Berlin because Americans can picture their metros; we scold Bogotá and shrug at Tegucigalpa because we have not learned their maps. A public that cannot place Oaxaca will not fund earthquake-safe schools there; a press corps that remembers Normandy will ask better questions about Guatemala 1954 or Chile 1973, but usually does not. Ignorance cheapens scrutiny; cheap scrutiny licenses double standards. (We will take the full tour in a subsequent piece; for now, consider this a window in the corridor.)

X. Three State Case Files (Deeper Dives)

A. Texas: What "Competitive" Forgot

Citations: FERC/NERC staff report; FERC summary.

B. California: The Valley Between Plans

Citations: 2024 Business Plan and program summaries.

C. Louisiana: Engineering with a Drowning Map

Citations: CPRA "A Changing Landscape"; Master Plan communications.

XI. What the Numbers Mean (and Don't)

XII. Five Reforms That Would Make the Next Trillion Build Faster and Fairer

  1. One-Page Statutes, One-Hundred-Page Specs: Congress should legislate intent + triggers clearly and then publish standard technical specs agencies can adopt quickly—so major questions review does not gum every gear. (Write the law like a score; play it like jazz.)

  2. Permitting by Playbook: For common project types (bridges, chargers, culverts), publish templated NEPA/Section 106 packages with default mitigations, and a fast lane when applicants adopt them verbatim.

  3. "No Surprises" Litigation Windows: Borrow from securities law: compressed windows for challenges, mandatory consolidation, and fee-shifting for frivolous suits. Public input stays robust—and finite.

  4. State Capacity Grants: Fund permanent project-delivery teams inside states and MPOs—owners' reps, schedulers, claims specialists—so we stop outsourcing our memory to consultants who have none.

  5. Measure What Civilians Feel: Require agencies to report uptime, travel-time savings for low-income commuters, flood-risk reduction, and maintenance backlogs cleared—not just dollars announced.

XIII. Scenes from a Functional Republic

XIV. Why I'm Still an Optimist (Regulated)

Because the country has done this before. We standardized track gauges. We taught cities to bury cholera under sewers. We built an interstate in twenty years that textbooks still worship. The infrastructure law is a down payment on adult government. Its uneven results do not prove the state can't build; they prove the state must learn.

Learning is cheaper than cynicism and pays better. It looks like a charger that just works, a train that is on the timetable and therefore in the culture, a coastal parish that still exists in 2075. It sounds like a committee meeting that ends on time because the template is already written.

I will take that melody over another detour.

Selected Sources & Further Reading

This completes the quartet of long-form essays exploring the hidden continuities that shape American public life. From the ghost of New Spain to the bench of mirrors, from the hidden hemisphere to the republic of detours—four meridians of light crossing the same democratic experiment.

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