How America made it impossible to build

There’s a familiar mood in American life right now, a frustration that feels both personal and ambient. The bridge doesn’t get fixed. The train line doesn’t get finished. The housing never gets built. The permits drag on. The timelines slip. The price tags balloon. And even when everyone agrees in principle that we really, really need to get things done, the system still can’t move.

Marc Dunkelman thinks that sense of paralysis isn’t a mystery, and it isn’t just a product of polarization or bad politicians. In his 2025 book Why Nothing Works, he argues that the deeper problem is structural. 

Over the last half-century, we’ve built a governing regime designed to stop government from doing harm. And it largely succeeded. But it also made government far less able to do good, especially at scale. Progressives, Dunkelman argues, can’t explain away this crisis by pointing only at conservatives and lingering Reagan-era anti-government ideology. If the left wants to use government to solve big problems, it has to be willing to rebuild government’s ability to execute.

I invited Dunkelman onto The Gray Area to talk about that tradeoff between democracy’s need for participation and accountability, and its equal need for empowered institutions that can actually deliver. We talk about the founding tension between Jeffersonian suspicion of centralized power and Hamiltonian faith in state capacity, why the mid-20th century was the high point of American “building,” and how well-intended reforms created a procedural thicket where “everyone has a voice” slowly became “everyone has a veto.”

As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, which drops every Monday, so listen and follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Your book’s called Why Nothing Works. Are you arguing that America’s broken?

I’m trying to connect with people who feel frustrated that a country that used to do big things now seems incapable of doing even the mundane. That frustration feels like a clue that something deeper’s gone wrong in American governance.

You frame this as a tension any democracy has to manage: Citizens need a real say, but government also needs enough authority to make big decisions and execute them. You trace that tension back to the founding, and you map it onto Hamilton and Jefferson. What’s the basic story?

From the beginning, America’s caught between two impulses; one is fear of centralized power. Jefferson writes the Declaration of Independence out of the sense that a distant bureaucracy is coercing colonists and that freedom means getting out from under that.

After independence, the founders built a system under the Articles of Confederation. It’s essentially the anti-empire model: Power is dispersed, there’s no real executive, and any state can effectively veto national action. It’s like a government run entirely by filibuster, except any state can do it.

Within a decade, people realized that the system produces chaos. Power’s so dispersed that government can’t function. So they tried again in 1787 with the Constitution, which is an attempt to strike a balance. Hamilton’s side is basically if you want a pluralistic society to make decisions, you need a stronger center. You need institutions that can act.

But that tension between liberty and authority isn’t uniquely American. Is there something distinct about the American aversion to state power?

I don’t think disagreement and distrust are unique to America. Any group of people has to figure out how to make decisions when everyone wants something different.

My wife and I have two daughters. Imagine it’s Friday night, nobody wants to cook, and everyone wants something different for dinner. One kid wants fried chicken sandwiches, the other wants doughnuts, and my wife wants something healthy. You’ve got to pick a restaurant or you’re going to starve. That’s democracy in miniature. What’s the system for resolving disagreement? Do you vote? Does anyone get a veto? Do you rotate? The stakes are smaller, but the problem’s the same.

Where America is distinctive is that our system’s built in a way that lets us swing between extremes. Sometimes we empower authority too much, like in the mid-20th century. Sometimes we disperse power so much that nothing happens, like now. We’ve got a tendency to oscillate.

A lot of distrust in government didn’t come out of nowhere, though. Vietnam, Iraq, Watergate, institutional racism, corporate capture, pollution, corruption. Isn’t the current predicament less about irrational distrust and more about a public that’s seen enough?

You’re right that these swings are responses to real conditions. There are moments when people feel government can’t do anything and they want more capacity. There are other moments when centralized institutions look oppressive and people want checks.

At the turn of the 20th century, politics is dominated by machines. You can get favors if you know the right local person, but you can’t build strong systems at scale. That pushes reformers toward more centralized professional administration.

Then you get the mid-century era of powerful institutions doing things people start to hate. You’ve got industry putting out unsafe products, agriculture using chemicals with devastating consequences, technocrats sending kids to Vietnam, big city bosses entrenching segregation, figures like Robert Moses bulldozing neighborhoods. People look at that and say, This Hamiltonian model isn’t just efficient, it’s also abusive. And that helps produce the progressive turn, starting in the 1960s and 1970s, toward constraining state power.

So when did we get the balance right? When was the “high-functioning” window?

It’s hard not to look at the Tennessee Valley Authority and see a high point of state capacity.

The TVA was created in the early New Deal. The upper South had been left behind. Private power companies didn’t want to build poles and wires for poor farmers because they didn’t think it’d pay off. So people stayed in poverty.

Roosevelt decides to use public power to electrify the region, and he empowers the TVA to act at enormous scale: dam rivers, reforest mountains, build power plants, lay transmission lines, sell subsidized appliances. In an incredibly short period of time, a region roughly the size of England is transformed.

It wasn’t perfect. There were real costs, including environmental consequences and segregation in the workforce. But it’s an example of government doing enormous good fast, at scale, in a place where the market wasn’t going to deliver.

What’s an analogous project today, something on that scale that we can’t do because the system’s too jammed up?

Clean energy is the obvious one. We’ve got the technology to replace fossil fuel generation. We’ve got wind, solar, batteries, transmission tech. But the obstacle isn’t the science. It’s that you can’t build the transmission lines. Everyone has an objection — not through this forest, not near that school, not across this town, not if it shuts down that plant, not if it doesn’t directly benefit me.

High-speed rail is another obvious example. You see what other countries do and you think: Can we really not build a line between Los Angeles and San Francisco?

I’ll give you a more specific case that feels very much like the TVA in miniature. The Biden administration put $7.5 billion into the bipartisan infrastructure law for electric vehicle chargers. It’s a smart idea because there’s a catch-22: Companies don’t want to build chargers where they won’t be used, and people don’t buy EVs because they’re worried they’ll get stranded.

But there’s no public workforce now like the TVA had. So the money gets distributed through state highway departments. Those agencies know how to pave roads and build bridges, but they don’t know how to site EV chargers, negotiate leases, coordinate utility hookups, run the bidding process, and manage all the veto points.

So after years, you end up with something like 58 chargers opened. It’s a political disaster, and it’s not because people are lazy or stupid. It’s because the system’s been built to make implementation incredibly hard.

Help me connect the dots. Conservatives have always distrusted state power. But progressives are supposed to be the builders, the people who believe in government. How did the pendulum flip?

A big part of the story is Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, which won the Pulitzer in 1975. It’s about Robert Moses, the most powerful man in New York from the 1930s through the 1960s. Moses builds highways, housing, Lincoln Center, massive infrastructure. He really shaped the city.

The most famous chapter is about the Cross Bronx Expressway. Moses drives a trench through a working-class neighborhood in the South Bronx, displacing thousands of people. Communities beg him to move the route a few blocks. The mayor’s against it. Moses doesn’t care. He has the power and he uses it.

People look at this and say we need to stop Moses. We need environmental reviews, historic preservation rules, community input requirements, civil rights protections, rights of action so people can sue. The goal is to prevent top-down abuse. And it worked, in the sense that it made it harder for someone like Moses to bulldoze a neighborhood. But it also helped create a system where it’s hard for anyone to do good things, too. By design, we made change incredibly difficult.

“By design, we made change incredibly difficult.”

So it’s a rational response that eventually becomes self-defeating. You stop Moses, but you also stop Penn Station from getting fixed.

Exactly. The question I ask is: Why could nobody stop Moses in the 1950s, and then 50 years later we can’t fix Penn Station, one of the busiest transit hubs in the hemisphere. It’s the same underlying dynamic. We created a governance structure with too many veto points.

Some people will hear this and say that you’re blaming progressive reforms for dysfunction, while downplaying the conservative project to deliberately make government fail. 

Conservatives absolutely play a role. But that story has become so dominant in progressive thinking that it gives us a pass. It lets us avoid self-criticism.

It also becomes a kind of political fatalism. If the story is always “Reagan broke everything,” then the only strategy is to win elections and hope. But if your pitch is that government should solve big problems, you’ve got to make government work in the places where it already has a mandate. Otherwise people won’t trust you with bigger ambitions.

What are the main policies and legal structures that jam things up now? NEPA comes up a lot. Is that ground zero?

NEPA is high on the list. It’s the National Environmental Policy Act, passed in 1970. It was originally meant to require project planners to consider environmental impacts and alternatives. In practice, it became a procedural litigation engine.

The key shift is that the legal question often isn’t whether a project’s impacts are worth it. It’s whether the study addressed every conceivable impact and alternative thoroughly enough. So agencies produce thousands and thousands of pages to anticipate lawsuits. It becomes a game: not “is this project good,” but “is the paperwork lawsuit-proof.”

And NEPA’s just one piece. There’s a whole regime of rules, mandates, and jurisprudence layered over decades. The cumulative effect is paralysis.

But who decides? Who has legitimate authority to make trade-offs that will anger people?

It’s got to be people inside government with discretion and accountability. In Moses’s era, you had “Moses men,” career public servants who stayed in jobs for a long time, took pride in building things, and had real authority. Today, a young public servant might enter government wanting to solve problems and end up spending their career managing risk, following rules, anticipating lawsuits, and trying not to get punished. They can spend 20 years and not feel like they made progress on the thing they entered government to do.

We need public institutions that aren’t oblivious to community concerns the way Moses was, but that also have enough discretion to make decisions in the public interest. The details are hard, but that’s the task.

We’ve got plenty of vivid examples: Obama’s Recovery Act triggering 192,000 NEPA reviews, the San Francisco public toilet saga, California high-speed rail. It’s lawsuits all the way down. What’s the model, if it’s not China?

The model is simple in principle: Nobody’s concern goes unheard, but nobody gets an automatic veto. We’re going to have to make hard choices, not just absurd ones like orchids versus carbon reduction, but genuinely hard trade-offs between environmental preservation and housing, between local disruption and regional benefit.

That means empowering executive-branch institutions to make decisions people won’t like. And it means changing the legal regime so disagreement doesn’t automatically translate into endless delay.

The trust problem is enormous. In the early 1960s, four out of five Americans trusted Washington to do what’s right. By 2022 it’s around one in five. Even if we rebuilt capacity, would people’s perceptions change?

This is the miraculous part of American democracy to me. If you lived in 1905 and saw how corrupt and incompetent government was, you couldn’t imagine we’d ever trust it with huge responsibilities. And yet by the mid-20th century we did.

Then in the 1950s and 1960s you had an establishment that looked totally impervious: Moses, Daley, Vietnam technocrats. You couldn’t imagine we’d ever end up in a world where the problem is that government can’t do anything, including rebuilding bridges.

We do swing. We do change. If government starts doing small things well, people will notice. There’s a virtuous cycle available. I can’t promise it’ll happen, but history suggests today’s dysfunction isn’t destiny.

Is it possible the mindset shift isn’t enough and we need constitutional reform? Courts, Congress, and states all contribute to anti-majoritarian gridlock. Can we rebuild state capacity within the existing order?

It’s possible we’ll need bigger reforms. I don’t want to rule it out. But we’ve gone through rough patches before, including periods of judicial obstruction and intense institutional conflict, and we’ve found ways to adapt. It can get worse, but it can also improve through changes in law, jurisprudence, and political will.

You suggest the left is the most plausible “builder coalition,” but is it possible the energy for a pro-building, pro-capacity agenda comes from the right first?

The left should stick to its core argument: There are people the market won’t serve, and government should help solve that. If the right starts borrowing those ideas, that’s a sign the argument’s winning. Ordinary voters aren’t committed to our ideological labels. They’re listening for what seems to work. If we can make government effective again, we’ll be in a much stronger position to persuade them.

Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

This series was supported by a grant from Arnold Ventures. Vox had full discretion over the content of this reporting.