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Biden never finished his biggest projects. That’s a good thing.

I continue to be a little dumbfounded by the reversal of Joe Biden's fortunes among liberals. Less than a year ago he was being hailed as the best president since FDR, a guy who had unexpectedly exceeded every expectation for his progressive accomplishments. Today he's derided as an almost epic failure.

The proximate cause for this is Biden's meltdown in the June debate, followed by a long string of mea culpas from journalists who say they should have recognized his mental decline earlier—and who blame Biden and his staff for covering it up.

Fair enough—though I think the hand-wringing has been a little overwrought. Still, his accomplishments remain the same, don't they? Maybe not:

This critique of Biden's infrastructure record has become something of a hurricane lately—even among the "Build something, dammit" crowd. But what did they expect? Even in a perfect world without red tape it takes time to build big things from scratch. At a minimum:

  1. States have to apply for initial funding.
  2. The feds have to approve state plans.
  3. Sites have to be located and purchased.
  4. Competitive bids have to be solicited and then accepted.
  5. If there are any lawsuits filed—and there will be—they have to be adjudicated.
  6. Contractors have to draw up plans.
  7. Then—finally!—they perform the actual construction.
  8. All the money isn't allocated at one time, so circle back to step 1 for further funding.

This takes years. It always has. Remember all the talk about "shovel-ready projects" during the Obama stimulus era? This was an acknowledgment that building projects generally aren't great stimulus because you can't skip straight to step 7 unless you've already done the previous steps and kept a bunch of construction projects all set to go, just waiting to be unleashed during a recession.

But even theoretically this isn't possible for brand new projects like charging stations, semiconductor fabs, rural broadband, or rooftop solar. You have to start at step 1, which is one reason why they're almost always scheduled to be rolled out over ten years. (The other reason is that there's only so much construction capacity available. You can't do everything at once.)

Of course, in real life there's also red tape. What's more, some of it is legit by anyone's standards. For example, the Politico piece that Ezra quotes above says the rural broadband project has hit snags in Virginia:

The issue holding Virginia back appeared to be the law’s affordability requirement. According to funding rules published in May 2022 by the Commerce Department, any provider taking the federal money needs to offer a low-cost service option. The administration and Virginia were locked in a multi-month standoff over exactly how to fulfill that requirement — an impasse that hit many other states as well.

This is a perfectly reasonable requirement. But it's also perfectly reasonable that there's disagreement over how precisely to implement it. That's just the nature of the world.

There's nothing new about this. The interstate highway program took 36 years to complete. The California state water project took upwards of 40 years. The Erie Canal took eight years. The Tevatron particle accelerator took 14 years. So did Mount Rushmore. Boston's Big Dig took 25 years. The Evergreen Point Floating Bridge took 19 years. The Tennessee Valley Authority took 12 years just to complete its first phase. The Panama Canal took a decade.

The billion-dollar, 7,700-foot Evergreen Floating Point Bridge in Seattle took 19 years from initial planning to ribbon cutting.

In a follow-up tweet Ezra takes an implicit dig against Biden: "It's hard to run on your $42 billion expansion of broadband when it hasn't expanded broadband. Change is what gets built, not how much money gets appropriated to build." Sure. But what realistic alternative was there? If politicians are willing to support only projects that will be finished in time for reelection, nothing big ever gets done and we'd justifiably mock them for being cynical and short-sighted. At least Biden was never that.

48 thoughts on “Biden never finished his biggest projects. That’s a good thing.

  1. cephalopod

    10 years? They've been talking about upgrading a bus line near me since 1998. Every few years they change their mind about what they want to do, on top if the usual complications (the metro area runs the busses, the street crosses 2 cities, the road is actually owned by the state, and business owners hate all construction and any lost parking).

  2. mary.contrary

    Hmmm... I'm old enough to remember when bloggers complained mightily about the cost and time involved in building big projects. They would use phrases like "train to nowhere" or "high speed boondoggle" or the like.

    Good times...

    1. DaBunny

      Non sequitur much? Kevin complained about the uselessness of California's high speed rail and about it's cost, only mentioning time in relation to originally projected schedules. The project was proposed in the 70s, and money was first spent on the project in the 80s.

      Comparing Ezra et al's complaints that Biden didn't get useful projects done in 4 years with Kevin's complaints that California has been wasting money on a useless and hugely overbudget project for almost half a century is disingenuous at best.

  3. tigersharktoo

    And a lot of these projects take a while because they are being done in urban/suburban areas.

    Take the carpool expansion project on the 405 in Kevin's neck of the woods. Is taking forever. Why? It is being done on existing infrastructure that must remain operational. Sort of like doing open heart surgery on a marathon runner, while he is running the marathon. It is vastly more complicated than doing a project from scratch.

    But China can do them in two years! Sure. In empty areas. Or the Government tells people in the way, Move! Now! Environmental protections? You Western Capitalist Lackey!

  4. Brett

    Ezra Klein and his wife Annie Lowery both seem to be unhappy with the real reason for Democratic Presidential election failure in 2024, that was basically "It was a referendum on Biden, who was an unpopular President - plus Trump gets some small but sufficient margin of people to show up in swing states who don't answer polls, and they only show up for him in voting". Ever since the election, they keep trying to explain it away as some kind of Democratic failure to deliver on stuff.

    Speaking of which, I think Biden's got a raw deal. Yes, he probably should have dropped out of re-election earlier - but probably any Democrat who was perceived as being too close to him was going to lose like Kamala. But the reason he ended up with an unpopular rating he couldn't shake was mostly not his fault - the inflation in 2021, Covid still lingering around to be nasty - or something that was the right thing to do and long overdue (getting out of Afghanistan).

    1. Murc

      It's always worth noting that Biden's approval rating dropped into the forties less than eight months into his term, before ANY of his substantial, landmark domestic accomplishments, and in fact due in some ways to one of his biggest foreign policy triumphs, and stayed there the whole way through.

      It literally had nothing to do with anything he did in office. People decided they were unsatisfied with him in September of 2021 and nothing changed their minds. And that, frankly, isn't on him.

      1. Ken Rhodes

        Eight months into his term wasn't the normal "new President honeymoon" period, was it? Instead, he had to deal with the worst of the Covid infection, before the vaccine was released, and exacerbated by a bunch of Republican politicians who jumped with glee while blaming it on Biden. At that point, the die had been cast.

      2. Brett

        What surprised me is that he couldn't shake it. I kept holding faith that Biden would eventually get out of it in 2024 as inflation receded, and because we were getting closer to the election and folks would eventually start to rally back around him as the alternative to Trump. But it never happened.

        Some of that has to be the absolutely, relentlessly negative conservative media treatment of him - but Obama had the same stuff and managed to shake it. And of course there's the romanticism that some swing voters seem to have about Trump, ignoring literally everything he says they don't want to hear because they like the guy.

        1. Are you gonna eat that sandwich

          I was similarly hopeful that economic reality would buoy Biden as 2024 went on, given that it is inarguable that things are much better for more people than they were in 2012 for example (or in 2020 for those who love to ask if voters are better off than they were 4 years previously).

          I think the two big factors that prevented this were (in order of importance) Biden’s precipitous decline as ‘24 wore on and the power of RW media being even more consequential than in the past. Biden simply didn’t have the energy or rhetorical ability to sell his achievements. Compare that to the relative youth and energy of Obama in 2012.

      3. Altoid

        And as Kevin has shown many a time, "people" who got disenchanted with Biden early on really means "Republicans," and especially includes Mighty Wurlitzer viewers/listeners. It's really hard to include that little tidbit in coverage without sounding "partisan," though, so it tends to get elided.

    2. jdubs

      Bidens approval ratings consistently ran a point or two below Obama's. The difference in a point or two is meaningless, but the media discourse over his approval rating is wildly different. You'd never guess how close he was to Obamas approval ratings.

  5. somebody123

    They shouldn’t have gone through the states. It’s a pernicious practice that needs to stop. Just create a new agency. Then you can ignore local zoning and planning and just build.

  6. Murc

    I continue to be a little dumbfounded by the reversal of Joe Biden's fortunes among liberals. Less than a year ago he was being hailed as the best president since FDR, a guy who had unexpectedly exceeded every expectation for his progressive accomplishments. Today he's derided as an almost epic failure.

    The proximate cause for this is Biden's meltdown in the June debate, followed by a long string of mea culpas from journalists who say they should have recognized his mental decline earlier—and who blame Biden and his staff for covering it up.

    Fair enough

    If by "fair enough" you mean "a lot of formerly serious people revealed themselves as being the idiots obsessed with aesthetics they spent a lot of their careers deriding; it turned aesthetics were all they cared about."

    Like, for serious. The debate did not somehow erase all his substantive accomplishments, and people who pivoted on a dime because of it are not be taken seriously. They are in fact dumb, where they aren't disingenuous or malicious.

    1. Anandakos

      That is a ridiculous over-simplification. Plenty of Democrats had been questioning the wisdom of Biden's desire for a second term, but nobody of any significance wanted to be Ted Kennedy, who doomed Carter's re-election chances even before the hostage situation.

  7. bharshaw

    One problem of big projects taking a long time--it can mean a lot of bad things can happen, like a change over in management or sponsorship--the new people don't like the old plans (look at how NASA changes its manned flight plans, moon-to-Mars-to-moon--to Musk's Mars. We got to the moon because LBJ was there almost all the way.

    Unfortunately you need the project to be big to get public supportt. The better way (i.e., more efficient) to have done the EV chargers was a pilot project, limited in scope geographically and time. But politically speaking that's hard to sell.

  8. scf

    You forgot a step between 6 and 7 that would be "Obtaining permits," which in a perfect world takes about two years for almost anything, and can take a decade or more for anything remotely complicated. A big issue here is not the environmental and other standards themselves, it is that elected officials underfund and understaff the agencies and departments who process the permits. I work for a company that builds renewable energy projects. We are fine meeting the standards, but the hangup is often that our permits get stalled when the one person qualified to review our permits is on sick leave and there is no one else to cover for them. This is a particular problem in conservative areas where lawmakers don't want to be accused of gutting popular protections but want to show they are "pro-business" by routinely cutting the budgets of regulatory agencies -- which is the opposite of what they should do if they, you know, actually understood business where the most important virtues are certainty and timeliness.

    1. Srho

      In brightest day, in darkest night,
      No flip-flop will escape Martin's sight.

      Thanks for the retrospective (which is itself a retrospective).

  9. NotCynicalEnough

    The original San Francisco Bay Bridge went from authorization for collecting tolls in 1929, construction starting in 1933 to open for rail and car service in 1936. Both spans and the tunnel connecting them cost $77m which would be about $1.8B in current dollars. Replacement of the eastern span took from damaged in 1989 to replaced and reopened in 2016. Much of the time was arguing about repair vs replace and then causeway vs "signature bridge". It cost $6.5B. It definitely takes much longer and costs a lot more money to build big projects today than it use to even adjusting for inflation.

  10. MrPug

    Here's my take. I think that Biden's accomplishments are the big spending/infrastructure bills, the courageous withdrawal from Afghanistan, his labor and antitrust records. For my money he has been far and away the most progressive president in my lifetime, admittedly in our political reality is a pretty low bar, but still the most progressive.

    My souring on him has everything to do with the failure Trump winning and the Biden mistakes that were factors in his win. Garland was an absolutely disastrous pick for, I think, at least, very obvious reasons, and not announcing, say, just after the midterms, that we was not going to run again so that a proper primary could have been conducted.

    Now, those 2 things would not have been as significant had Harris won so my souring came after the election. Now that Trump has won, however, those 2 things will overshadow the very real accomplishments of his Administration and may end democracy in this country.

    I will add that not waiting 2 years to do anything about Trump's crimes and not dropping out earlier may not have ensured a Democratic victory, but those 2 mistakes very much hurt the Democrat chance of winning.

      1. azumbrunn

        The fact is he was smart. I used to read him in the old blogger days. It's all the more disappointing to see how he ended up.

        1. Salamander

          Exactly. If Mr Klein had always been so-so, his recent decline wouldn't be so sad or maddening. I used to enjoy his insights.

  11. Joseph Harbin

    Thank you, Kevin, for the excellent and necessary take-down of Ezra Klein, who really ought to know better.

    Once upon a time, he supported Democratic policies and a Democratic president. His politics have flipped. He now is an anti-Democrat through and through. He can't write a column or do an interview without undermining the political side he came out of. His higher-ups no doubt think he's doing a swell job, and no doubt he has been rewarded in swell fashion. Swell for him ain't well for the country, unfortunately.

    1. azumbrunn

      I don't think this is quite true. He is a NYTimes columnist and has redirected his mind to that position. Which is "neutrality" which in practice works consistently to favor the Republicans.

  12. Salamander

    Turning on Biden is par for the course, and don't blame the Democrats: the "mainstream" media always lead the way and Dems follow slavishly along. Look at LBJ. A total failure. A disgrace. Totally shameful record. Nothing good to say. Vietnam. That's the sum total of the man. And look how mean he was to little Hubert Humphrey!

    Because Medicare was nothing. The Civil Rights Act was nothing. None of those things are remembered today, nor did they do any good for anybody, right? Right??

  13. cld

    I've never seen the Floating Point Bridge in real life, but that picture makes it look astoundingly unattractive. All that time, all that money and that's what we end up with?

    1. Anandakos

      Not "Floating Point Bridge", "Evergreen Point Floating Bridge". But yes, from the air it's an ugly scar on a beautiful lake. The "Lacy V Morrow Bridge" or "I-90 Bridge" four miles south is too.

  14. AsianExpat

    Ezra Klein has a book coming out that will sell better under the general impression that bureaucracy no longer functions in the US. I’m looking forward to seeing if there has been any increase in disfunction as of late or whether this is bureaucracy as usual.

  15. Justin

    We could just stop asking government to do these things. That’s my recommendation. Just stop promising and doing… anything new. Wildly outlandish expectations and demands should be laughed out of congress and out of the Democratic Party platform.

  16. Doctor Jay

    From Marcy Wheeler: https://www.emptywheel.net/2024/12/30/the-opportunity-costs-of-conspiracy-theories-about-merrick-garland/

    It seems relevant to this discussion.

    I could give a flying f[s]ck about Merrick Garland.

    What I care about is that at a time when we need to start establishing means of accountability for a second Trump term, much of the Democratic world has chosen instead to wallow in false claims about the Trump investigation in order to make Garland a scapegoat, rather than the guy directly responsible, John Roberts. It’s classical conspiracy thinking. Something really bad happened (Trump got elected), it’s not entirely clear why (because almost no one bothers to learn the details I’ve laid out here, to say nothing of considering the political work that didn’t happen to make Trump own this), and so people simply invent explanations. Every time those explanations get debunked, people double down on the theory — it’s Garland’s fault — rather than reconsidering their chosen explanation.

    And those explanations have the effect of distracting attention from Roberts. Rather than talking about how six partisan Justices rewrote the Constitution to give the leader of the GOP a pass on egregious crimes, Democrats are choosing to blame a guy who encouraged prosecutors to follow the money in March 2021.

    It’s a choice. And it’s a choice that guarantees maximal impotence. It’s a choice that eschews actual facts (and therefore the means to actually learn what happened). It’s a choice that embraces irrational conspiracy thinking (which makes people weak and ripe for manipulation by authoritarians). It’s a choice that distracts from Roberts’ role

  17. Doctor Jay

    I observe that while these projects are good things, they don't make good politics. Because they are so slow to deliver. There's no attention focused on them at the time of the election.

    That doesn't mean you shouldn't do them. It means that you need to do things that do focus attention - positivie attention, or at least attention that can be spun in a positive way - at election time.

    And no, I don't think Biden did all that well on the political front. I think he was just fine on the policy front.

    I also think that the number one contributor to Biden's poor debate performance were his worries about Hunter. So Rep Comey can put that notch in his belt. He managed to turn his own president into a basket case. Something you can be proud of, I'm sure.

  18. ronp

    The new bridge was not built in 19 years --

    Evergreen Point Floating Bridge
    Construction start 2011
    Construction cost $4.65 billion (project budget)
    Opened April 11–25, 2016

    1. ColBatGuano

      The original bridge was approved in 1953 and opened in 1963. Construction started in 1960 after a lot of bickering over the location. I have no idea where the "19 years" came from. The initial discussion of a second bridge over Lake Washington started in 1949, but it was far from approved at that point.

  19. jeffreycmcmahon

    This leaves out one of the truly major reasons people on the farther left end of the spectrum don't like Biden, which is one word: Gaza.

    Also it's weird that Mr. Drum omits that he wanted Biden to not just drop out of the race in June, but resign immediately, an insane moment that it seems he'd like everyone to forget.

    1. gs

      I have to wonder why Kevin left off Gaza. The timing is no coincidence.

      "I continue to be a little dumbfounded by the reversal of Joe Biden's fortunes among liberals. Less than a year ago he was being hailed as the best president since FDR, a guy who had unexpectedly exceeded every expectation for his progressive accomplishments. Today he's derided as an almost epic failure."

      The corporate democrats did back flips to support Biden over the actual liberal - Bernie Sanders - who is, in fact, Jewish and who nevertheless opposes the Gaza genocide. This is exactly the same thing the corporate democrats did in 2016 when Debbie Wasserman Schultz used everything at the DNC's disposal to torpedo Sanders and promote Clinton.

  20. Austin

    Nobody cares at all about Gaza. Maybe not literally “nobody” but the number of people who truly care about the people living in Gaza is probably way less than 0.5% of the country. I would call something that matters to only 0.5% of the population a “major reason” but YMMV I guess. But I would bet my annual salary that if you asked 200 people on the street “where is Gaza and why does Israel have problems with it?” you’d be lucky to find 1 person who could answer coherently and accurately.

  21. D_Ohrk_E1

    If the government had provided very short deadlines things would be more expensive but the results would be quickly tangible and people would make the connection between policy and outcome.

    This is one of those instances where I would have been okay with Biden breaking a few things along the way and fixing it after the fact. Patience in politics is short and projects cannot take a decade, or even four years.

  22. DButch

    Boston's Big Dig took 25 years,

    And we got to "enjoy" a good 18 years of it before making a lateral arabesque to the western end of I-90 in WA. I finally got back on a business trip in 2007 to see the completed project.

    As Barney Frank notably said: "It would have been cheaper to jack Boston up and run the highway under it."

  23. spatrick

    This is why Matt Yglesias has become so prominent as a pundit because he has been pointing out these problems with bureaucracy and permitting and environmental reviews and this red tape that prevents these projects from happening in real time to have an immediate impact, not 20 years from now or never at all. It goes back to simple governance and if it's not helping people when they need it, then don't expect them to reward you for it in the meantime.

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