The federal-state-county framework makes bureaucracy quite entangled and difficult to move quickly. Then there’s also another layer of approximately 50,000 special purpose government district with unique forms (think water boards, utility entities etc) so there’s a tremendous amount of work navigating all these bodies and their respective turfs.
There’s also a huge lack of standardisation (e.g. imagine if there was a single national mandatory building code) so even if the Federal government wanted to actually do the work (and not outsource it to state level road authorities), they wouldn’t just be able to use a standard EV charger station design and contract it out for construction, they’d need to check the design for each and every county-level building and electricity code.
How would you improve governance? Strengthen national standardisation, merge states less than 5 million residents, centralise more power with federal and state governments and standardise and merge special purpose government entities, at least at the county level
Does anyone know why the US is especially incompetent when it comes to infrastructure? Is it just capitalism or is something else going on?
It’s not like we have any shortage of people who can build them, since the job market is so competitive. Is it just the government is too weak-willed?
there’s absolutely some crazy levels of embezzlement happening all down the chain
The federal-state-county framework makes bureaucracy quite entangled and difficult to move quickly. Then there’s also another layer of approximately 50,000 special purpose government district with unique forms (think water boards, utility entities etc) so there’s a tremendous amount of work navigating all these bodies and their respective turfs.
There’s also a huge lack of standardisation (e.g. imagine if there was a single national mandatory building code) so even if the Federal government wanted to actually do the work (and not outsource it to state level road authorities), they wouldn’t just be able to use a standard EV charger station design and contract it out for construction, they’d need to check the design for each and every county-level building and electricity code.
How would you improve governance? Strengthen national standardisation, merge states less than 5 million residents, centralise more power with federal and state governments and standardise and merge special purpose government entities, at least at the county level
This is an excellent read on the subject https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2021/08/the-value-of-nothing-capital-versus-growth/
They don’t wanna do it and don’t care to fix that problem.