“Shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected,” President Obama joked in 2011 about his failed economic stimulus. But as funny as Obama and his millionaire CEO audience found this line, the American people were not amused.

Despite spending more than $1 trillion on programs to jump-start the economy, the nation’s unemployment rate was still above 9 percent at the time. The major reason the stimulus failed to produce as many infrastructure jobs as White House economists predicted was that environmental laws — particularly the National Environmental Policy Act, as currently written and administered — make it next to impossible to get approval for projects in a timely manner.