‘You Try to Build Anything, and You’re Stepping Into Quicksand’

Opinion|‘You Try to Build Anything, and You’re Stepping Into Quicksand’

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.