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NewsMaterial5 min readDisconfirmAI Editorial

a16z American Dynamism Editor Matt Cronin: What Is Holding Back U.S. Rebuilding Is Not Democracy, But Procedure

The article argues that the root cause of stalled U.S. industrial construction is capital uncertainty created by federal environmental review procedures, rather than the democratic system or environmental standards themselves; using high-speed rail in Spain, chip factories in Taiwan, and tunnels in Switzerland as counterexamples, it proposes five specific legislative reform directions as a path to unlocking U.S. construction capacity.

2026-11-09 23:02 GMT+8

San Francisco broke ground on the Golden Gate Bridge in 1933, opening it to traffic four years later at a cost of $35 million. In the same city, a 150-square-foot public restroom containing one metal toilet and a baby changing station had a budget of $1.7 million and took over two years to complete. Even after accepting a donated modular restroom and pro bono engineering design, the project ultimately cost taxpayers approximately $200,000, because the donated toilet still required sign-off from more than six agencies, including the Arts Commission.

This contrast is not an isolated example—the same story repeats itself across the country.

In this article published on November 9, 2026, Matt Cronin, editor of the a16z American Dynamism column, uses this contrast as the starting point for his core argument: America has not lost its ability to build, but has buried that capacity under meaningless procedures. His judgment is that the problem lies with procedure, not the democratic system, nor environmental standards themselves.

The article first dismisses two popular explanations. The first suggests that democracy itself is the cost—that too many voices lead to inefficiency. Cronin rebuts this by noting that history is full of examples of authoritarian states failing miserably at industrial projects. China, the benchmark for authoritarian industrialization, produces ghost cities and industrial overcapacity. What truly enables democracies to build at high speed is clear attribution of power, standardized requirements, predictable financing, competent agencies, and rules that force governments to make decisions rather than merely create opportunities for delay. After the U.S. Congress established dedicated financing, national standards, and clear federal-state responsibility divisions in 1956, roughly half of the Interstate Highway System was opened within a decade.

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The second popular explanation holds that endless procedure is the price of environmental safety. Cronin points out that industrial output does not disappear; it simply shifts elsewhere. China emits two to three times more carbon per unit of output than the United States. Stopping a factory here does not eliminate emissions; it exports them to dirtier producers. He uses counterexamples to illustrate this: mining permitting in Canada and Australia can be up to five times faster than in the U.S.; Madrid expanded its metro faster and at lower cost than almost any city despite being bound by strict EU environmental laws; and Switzerland bored through the world's largest railway tunnel beneath the Alps, completing it a year ahead of schedule. These countries do not value nature less; they emphasize substantive environmental protection while minimizing procedural delays.

The United States did not take this path. Instead, it combined an extremely rigorous procedural apparatus with a litigation system seemingly incapable of producing finality.

Cronin points the finger at the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Unlike substantive laws such as the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act, NEPA is procedural: it requires federal agencies to analyze and disclose environmental impacts before major actions involving federal land, permits, or financing. In 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that regulatory layering and aggressive litigation had transformed NEPA from a modest procedural requirement into a blunt instrument used to block new construction. In 2024, simple environmental assessments took an average of over a year, while more complex Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) took nearly four years. Data from the U.S. Department of Energy shows the average EIS cost is $6.6 million, and even smaller assessments cost $300,000—this does not include legal fees, manpower, and litigation costs.

For investors, the key mechanism is uncertainty. Cronin writes that when a permit cannot provide certainty, capital cannot be deployed, and America cannot build. The Cape Wind project in Massachusetts—a 468-megawatt offshore wind plan—was abandoned after more than 15 years and spending over $100 million, without a single turbine built. Developers' money was spent responding to dozens of overlapping and often contradictory agencies, hundreds of officials, and thousands of pages of impact statements.

The article proposes five legislative priorities, corresponding to provisions in the Senate's 2026 Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act: Limit Procedural Review (allow construction to continue while correcting NEPA errors, and establish that federal loans or guarantees alone no longer trigger NEPA review); Enforce Hard Deadlines (set insurmountable time limits for federal authorizations and establish legal mechanisms to incentivize timely agency decisions); Establish One Project, One Review (designate a lead agency and bind federal participants to a single coordinated review); Make Permits Final (prohibit injunctions based on procedural flaws from halting construction, and prohibit agencies from revoking valid permits absent extraordinary circumstances); Simplify Permitting (clear routine activities through categorical exclusions, allow agencies to adopt each other's exclusions, and encourage federal-state cooperation to pre-clear sites).

Cronin concludes: We have not lost the ability to build great things; we have just buried it under layers of meaningless procedure. What needs to change is for Congress to clear the way.

Boundaries to note: a16z is a venture capital firm whose portfolio companies in AI infrastructure, energy, and manufacturing directly benefit from faster approvals. The causal claims in the article—that these five specific reforms will produce the stated construction outcomes—are the author's argumentation rather than verified results. The cases of Spain, Taiwan, and Switzerland operate in different political and legal contexts, and their transferability to the U.S. system requires reader judgment. However, the analytical framework provided by the article—identifying procedural uncertainty, rather than the political system or environmental standards themselves, as the constraint on capital deployment—has practical reference value for assessing policy risks related to investments in U.S. reindustrialization.

Sources

  • a16z.news↗
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