It sounds to me like this is about the minimizing redundency, and switching to concurrent rather than sequential review. The environmental protection laws underpinning these reviews are unchanged. It seems like an honest attempt to improve the functioning of government, independent of ideology.
We can't even say it will improve the functioning of the government; it will just make the government faster. Faster at doing good things, or faster at doing bad things.
My 2 cents is that a faster approvals cycle will lead to more private sector activity which should help increase the productivity of investments. Even for public sector stuff, in many cases the cost is greatly inflated by the regulatory delay.
Or to put it another way, I’m pretty wary of federal infra projects in general but I don’t think there’s a compelling argument in favor of slower regulatory review.
In this context "bad things" would mean either approving things that shouldn't go through, or blocking things that should. It seems to me that leaving things in limbo where they might go through or not at an unknown later date is worse than either.
And that's without even counting the benefit when correct decisions get sped up.
There's an argument to be made that a process that allows more time for evidence to be gathered to stop the bad projects would generate a more net positive result. That argument does, of course, relegate the machinations of bureaucracy and the pressure from various stakeholders to a bit of a spherical cow, though.
Before you tear down a fence, learn why it was built in the first place. The real question is, why were approvals processed in serial? It's very possible that the input for some reviews requires the output from others, for example. Think of an analogy: If someone said 'we'll speed up X software by running it concurrently', you'd have a lot of questions before you believed it.
I've seen this mistake before. For example, when the F-35 was being planned people had lots of similarly 'obvious' cost-saving and time-saving ideas: Instead of all these different services and countries buying different planes, why not all buy a common plane and get enormous economy of scale in production, maintenance, training, etc.? Instead of doing the waterfall method and locking in all the specs and developing all the tech before production, why not do it more iteratively, save time and get other benefits? We learned the answers: 1. It's hard enough to meet the demanding (existential) requirements and bleeding edge tech development needs of one service; building one solution to please 3 services and a dozen countries is impossible. 2. That works for software, not $100 million hardware.
I'm not saying it's a bad idea; I'm saying that we don't know and that the reason for the fence is the interesting, valuable information.
I bet that if powers that be decided not to unify F35, we’d end up with 3 specialized stealth fighter projects costing $1T each, and without the ability to stockpile just one set of parts for sustained maintenance.
I think you've learned the wrong lesson from the F35's development. It likely would've been more cost efficient to build three different planes that are specialized to the needs of each branch of the military. One reason that the plane has been such a boondoggle (1.5 trillion in development cost) is that it is trying to be everything for everyone.
Optimizing a fighter jet for replacement parts is monumentally stupid. It should be optimized for its ability to perform its job in the field and it turns out each branch needs a different type of plane. Stockpiling several sets of parts is of least concern and is unlikely to cost more money.
The Air Force and Navy both need (or want) a light, stealthy fighter-bomber. Historically, there's no good reason not to just make the Air Force use the same planes the Navy does. They just never actually agree on which plane they want and it's easier to let both services have their own way.
The only tricky part is that the Marines need a STOVL close-air-support bomber to replace the Harrier, and the Royal Navy needs a STOVL fighter-bomber to replace the Harrier since they don't have full-sized carriers. There's some commonality between those requirements and the Navy/Air Force requirements--there's some rationale for stealthy CAS planes, and your STOVL plane needs to be a full-featured fighter-bomber for the Brits to want it anyway--but STOVL is a lot more complex than normal horizontal flight.
> The Air Force and Navy both need (or want) a light, stealthy fighter-bomber. Historically, there's no good reason not to just make the Air Force use the same planes the Navy does.
This is not actually true. The Navy needs a heavy chassis that can withstand repeated 4G+ carrier takeoffs and landings, the Air Force wants a lighter chassis that leaves more room for payload and allows more maneuverability. The Navy wants dual-engine configurations for reliability for over-water flight, the Air Force prefers single-engine for greater simplicity and weight efficiency.
You can make something like the Tomcat or Hornet work, but it's not as agile as a dedicated interceptor, can't carry as much weight as a dedicated strike aircraft, and is heavier than a dedicated light-multirole aircraft. It's also more maintenance-intensive and has higher fuel consumption/shorter range than all of these. Money is no object for the US military, we get the best aircraft for the role, period. You can disagree about whether that should be the policy, but it is.
The Marines' STOVL requirement is a third set of requirements that is totally disjoint to the other services, agreed. I don't know enough about it other than a general sense that it's possibly the complex task to engineer out of all of these. Airplanes go forward, not up and down. From a financial perspective, we might be better off just telling the Marines to fly helos instead and operate light strike aircraft off improved strips once we have a beachhead, but again, money is noobject, so they get a rube-goldberg airplane that can go up and down and land on their pipsqueak carriers.
That’s the theory, but are the differences between, for instance, the F-16 and F/A-18 really enough to make any difference in any conceivable threat environment? It’s already a hard sell having dedicated fighters in the first place, since the US military hasn’t operated without air supremacy since the first weeks of the Gulf War. Is there a realistic threat model where the increased maneuverability of a single-engine light fighter provides any benefit whatsoever?
The U.S. military publicly agreed with your argument until a few years ago. To bomb primitive foes like ISIL or the Taliban, they don't even need F-16s; low-end planes or drones can do the job. Sec Def Bob Gates canceled several high-end weapons programs planned in the Cold War for that reason.
But now the U.S. military expects to compete with 'near-peer' enemies such as China and Russia, and that is what they are preparing for. In that threat environment, any advantage or disadvantage can be significant.
Direct, conventional war between the US and another major nuclear power isn’t a likely threat model. As soon as one side starts losing, the nukes are gonna come out and conventional forces become irrelevant.
So it doesn’t matter if the USAF can go toe-to-toe with the Russian Air Force or the Chinese. What does matter is whether Ukraine or Poland or Turkey or Japan or Korea can effectively resist Russian or Chinese conventional warfare. As long as they can, then we only have to worry about being able to stomp countries like Iran, and in that environment, Super Hornets are plenty.
> Direct, conventional war between the US and another major nuclear power isn’t a likely threat model. As soon as one side starts losing, the nukes are gonna come out and conventional forces become irrelevant.
A few thoughts:
1. You may be correct.
2. But 'not likely' isn't sufficient odds when it comes to survival of the U.S. and its allies. The U.S. has to be prepared for unlikely and even very unlikely threats when they are existential.
3. The U.S. government believes it must prepare for near-peer warfare; it's unchallenged consensus in national security circles AFAICT. That doesn't make it correct, but that does have some weight.
4. The Russians explicitly disagree. Look up their 'escalate to de-escalate' tactics, which includes use of nuclear weapons in limited warfare.
5. Some hawks in China believe they can, through a fast, aggressive strike, drive the U.S. out of certain strategic areas and intimidate the U.S. into substantially withdrawing from East Asia.
6. Strong conventional forces can deter Russian and Chinese hawks from doing something crazy.
I'm still not convinced that the marginal difference between specialized naval and terrestrial fighter-bombers is the most cost-effective way to move the needle, though. Even against near-peer adversaries, the US and its allies have substantial naval and air superiority. Wouldn't it make more sense to focus on pressing those advantages? (Of course, we kind of foreclosed on that by shutting down the F-22 and doubling down on the F-35...)
> there's no good reason not to just make the Air Force use the same planes the Navy does
Perhaps the Navy plane is designed to fly from carriers; to operate in a wet, salty marine environment; and to operate where resources (fuel, parts, etc.) can be limited? Why would the Air Force want to make all those trade-offs in a $100 million plane? Remember that any trade-off will result in a certain number of additional dead pilots, failed missions, and lost expensive capital in a war.
Perhaps the services need different ranges, have different refueling capabilities, have different functional needs (hunting subs, for example). They do different jobs, despite the fact that they both use small planes.
the Royal Navy needs a STOVL fighter-bomber to replace the Harrier since they don't have full-sized carriers
The QE class carriers are 50% larger than the French carrier that has cats’n’traps and can happily operate any navalized aircraft. It’s not that they’re too small. It’s that they were designed by idiots. Then more idiots signed the cheques for them.
Perhaps there were done sequentially so that if a project fails one stage or has to be changed to comply, all the other stages' work isn't wasted. Like a branch misprediction in a CPU. That might make the approval more expensive overall but having things finished faster is also an advantage to weigh against it.
But that would only work if you can arrange to have the more likely to fail stages earlier in the process. If the last of ten steps fails 5% of the way through, you have wasted 95% of the approval cost. If all the steps are done at the same time and one of the steps fails 5% of the way through you have only wasted 5%.
Is it appropriate to be concerned that this will result in infrastructure being approved without sufficient review, potentially resulting in dangerous infrastructure?
From TFA, it says that the delays are due to the various agencies involved (Depts. of Interior, Commerce, Homeland Security, EPA, FERC) doing their reviews sequentially. Now they will do them concurrently. I imagine that if one agency needed information from another, they could ask for it (rather than waiting for it and n other intermediate review processes to end). Otherwise, it looks like the diligence involved should be the same.
Our entire economy is based on people being able to tasks while other people do other tasks. Concurrency is everywhere and we seem to manage just fine.
That comment doesn't make sense in this situation. The different agencies review and approve different things, so there should be little or no overlap.
If the improvement is aiming for 2 years, what is it now? I understand that some of these things are broad and / complex, but dragging it out only dates the discovery process. At the very least, phase the projects.
That said, what about completion time? Can that be effected in some positive way? Or will it continue to be bid low and just keep tacking on the overuns?
Speaking of infrastructure. Does anyone know the current status of the "dig once" rule (contained in the Ray Baum Act) as it pertains to the US Senate?
It passed through the House in early March. I can't seem to locate any information about it after that. Supposedly it was due to easily sail through the Senate.
Making the agencies do their reviews in parallel seems like a safe way to speed up the approval/review process. I know we tend to be cynical about any change like this in government processes, but I'm trying to have some (IMHO reasonable) hope here.
I tend to skew very left politically, but I'm having a hard time seeing Democrats/Enviro groups' opposition to this as anything but strictly political. They often champion the idea that government can work and do so efficiently. For once I'd like to see them support an effort to do just that.
I believe that a working high speed rail system will help make working in California more affordable if it is practical to live outside the metro areas of the Bay Area and LA and still work there. I also expect it will cut down on traffic fatalities on I-5.
Everything I've read about Trump's infrastructure initiative leads me to believe it is planned as a largely unfunded mandate cum strong outsourcing and privatization initiative.
The Federal government isn't going to pay for much of anything. They're telling states to "get it done" and pushing strongly for privatization of public resources as a means of paying for this.
(Think Illinois' Skyway, other toll roads that never met their schedules for shutting down payments to investors and going public, Chicago's public parking garages and parking meters, and many examples farther afield.)
While public projects aren't perfect, this inserts (even more of) a profit motive into overall management, and in practice often ends up providing "less for more". Rather than some supposedly more efficient management, such privatization initiatives seem more often to merely introduce another middle-man -- one having unprecedented control and no competition.
There's a lot of money sloshing around the investment world, looking for "tangible assets" with strong and highly predictable and controllable rates of return. Hedge funds are moving into real estate and rentals. Sovereign wealth funds have wanted a piece of Chicago's infrastructure-based revenue streams. Canadian and other housing prices exploding with foreign investment.
As for "rushing things along", we have a prime example of this and perhaps forerunner of this Federal initiative, with FoxConn in Wisconsin. Things already seem to be going significantly wrong:
So, I don't really see this initiative as an honest effort to improve efficiencies while maintaining current regulation -- regulation that, for its sometimes faults, was usually put into place for good reason and is better than the alternative it replaced.
I see it as an initiative to expedite the enrichment of large private interests who have the current administration's ear -- as well as those of many state and some local governments. (Local is sometimes harder, because you're dealing with people who will directly have to live with the consequences. Once they realize that the people who are on board are selling the rest out.)
If you expect the current administration to deliver anything you can expect it to do it with less thinking and more impulse. Trump has said he regards infrastructure as a very popular sweetner. You should be extremely skeptical and watch for the thing it's sweetening.
There is certainly some reason to be skeptical of the real intent and implementation of this change by the current administration but we'll have to see.
