Cutting the Red Tape

“It took four years to build the Golden Gate bridge and five years to build the Hoover Dam, and less than one year to build the Empire State Building,” Trump said in a speech after a roundtable discussion at the Department of Transportation. “But today it can take 10 years—and far more than that—just to get the approvals and permits needed to build a major infrastructure project.”

In his remarks, Trump spoke with cutting contempt for the Washington status quo.

“In the private sector you move and you wheel and you deal and you hope and you pray and maybe it goes a little faster,” he said. “I was not elected to continue a failed system, I was elected to change it.”

Trump also made use of some props. At one point, he stopped to scrutinize a pair of dizzyingly complicated flowcharts that representing the highway permitting process. At another, he stepped away from the podium to rifle through a “70-pound” pile of comically large binders, the results of a $76 million environmental study done for a single Maryland road.

“I don’t even know what this is,” he said, prompting laughter as he tossed it to the floor. “How can the country prosper under this kind of nonsense?”

To back up his assurances, Trump mentioned several concrete proposals designed to relieve the regulatory pressure on cities and states.

“Our goal is to give you one point of contact to deliver one decision, yes or no, for the entire federal government, and to deliver that decision quickly,” Trump said. “To do this, we are setting up a new council to help project managers navigate the bureaucratic maze. This council will also improve transparency by creating a new online dashboard, allowing everyone to easily track major projects through every stage of the approval process. This council will make sure that every federal agency that is consistently delaying projects by missing deadlines will face tough new penalties.”