"Legislating shouldn't be this hard."

Philip Howard is the author of The Death of Common Sense and other books focused on practical solutions to our ossified governance. I have been lucky enough to have known him for a couple of decades and to have collaborated with him from time to time. I am sharing his post of today about our new infrastructure legislation with his permission. Check it out as well as his organization, Common Good.

Infrastructure: One Thing Missing

Legislating shouldn’t be this hard. The House finally approved, and the President will sign today, the Senate’s $1.2 trillion “hard” infrastructure bill, to fix roads, rails, broadband, transmission, and other infrastructure needs. The package includes Common Good’s streamlining reforms such as two years for permitting and a 200-page limit on environmental reviews. Following publication of our 2015 report “Two Years, Not Ten Years,” we testified in hearings and worked with Senate staff on these reforms, which will save money and expedite green infrastructure.

Common Good has also called for a plan to avoid waste in implementation. The $1.2 trillion package is about $10,000 for every American household. Without implementation oversight, the money will gush out of Washington without any discipline over, for example, New York work rules that can make infrastructure projects five times as expensive as in other developed countries.

America should get its money’s worth, not waste half the money in featherbedding and other archaic procurement practices. President Biden has appointed former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu to oversee the plan. This is a step in the right direction, but he will not have authority to override wasteful practices that are imbedded in existing procedures and contracts.

We call upon Congress to create a nonpartisan National Infrastructure Board, to oversee priorities and enforce commercially reasonable contracts. This new board, comparable to base-closing commissions, could save several hundred billion dollars on this one infrastructure program alone.

Other countries such as Australia have comparable boards. Here’s our proposal on how it could work, and a short video on why it’s needed.

If you agree, please urge your representatives to champion a National Infrastructure Board. Let’s build as much infrastructure as we’re paying for. Isn’t that worth a short law?

- Philip