If We Can Do It In Baltimore…

Last March, a container ship collided with a main support of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, causing the central spans of the 1.6-mile-long bridge to collapse. The public response to the catastrophe has been unified: the bridge should be rebuilt, fast.

Despite decades of slow and inefficient American infrastructure, there is reason to believe this might actually happen. Disaster relief marshals a rare political consensus for speed, sweeping away the thicket of regulations, procedures, and dysfunctional politics that ordinarily plague American infrastructure. Early planning for the bridge is encouraging: planners have announced a relatively aggressive four-year timeline and are receiving an expedited regulatory process.

But quick rebuilds are isolated successes. The conditions that speed disaster rebuilds do not translate to broader reform. Critics often blame a lack of political will for allowing slow bureaucracy and inefficient planning. But the causality also runs the other direction: decades of procedural cruft and reduced state capacity sap the political will needed to build.

It is tempting to believe that disaster rebuilds offer a blueprint to build faster — if we can do it that quickly then, why not do it that quickly all the time? But they actually show us the magnitude of the problem. We have built a system so complex that it takes a crisis to conjure the political will to get around it.

Baltimore’s Key Bridge rebuild comes at a time of growing enthusiasm for permitting reform — the idea that we can improve American infrastructure by streamlining the cumbersome process of obtaining building permits. But permitting reform is about more than just reducing paperwork. Infrastructure projects require complex interactions between bureaucrats, politicians, and engineers. That process has been gummed up by decades of regulatory layers — laws, permits, veto points, compliance standards, court rulings, and litigation — that have led to lengthy approval timelines and soaring infrastructure costs. The aim of permitting reform is to simplify this process.

Disaster responses offer a clear contrast to the way things are normally done. In June 2023, a bridge on I-95 in Northeast Philadelphia collapsed after a tanker truck caught fire in an underpass, halting traffic along the entire corridor. But, astonishingly, the highway was reopened to traffic only twelve days later, months ahead of most predictions. The success is a showcase for a process stripped down to the basics. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro used his disaster authority, suspending any law or regulation that would impede swift recovery. Construction crews, working around the clock, engineered and built a temporary road in less than a week.

The rebuild of the Key Bridge in Baltimore will be considerably more complicated. Whereas the I-95 collapse required relatively simple construction — removing rubble, infilling, and paving over an underpass — reconstructing a mile-and-a-half-long bridge over water will take a lot more planning and work. So far, authorities have removed wreckage from the water and begun the planning process. The new design is expected to be taller and feature a slightly longer main span, providing greater clearance for shipping traffic. Initial estimates expect the project to be completed by 2028 and cost between $1.7 and $1.9 billion.

Because the Key Bridge rebuild is a response to a disaster, it benefits from significant tailwinds. Rebuilds enjoy near-universal public support, giving a mandate to public officials to plan for ambitious timelines. Public support helps get funding — Congress is expected to cover most, and perhaps all, of the rebuilding costs. Additionally, a catastrophic collapse brings a rare degree of attention, giving politicians an incentive to act quickly and show they can get stuff done. Disasters also create accountability: the public knows what used to be there and feels the pain of inaction.

Crucially, the Key Bridge rebuild has received a categorical exclusion under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), allowing the project to skip the burdensome environmental review process. This is a big deal: no law better exemplifies the costs of regulation than NEPA, which requires the federal government to produce a lengthy report analyzing the environmental impacts of a potential project. On its face, NEPA codifies desirable policy goals: the government should consider environmental impacts during project planning and inform the public of potential hazards. But through regulatory accretion, NEPA has been twisted into a tax on new infrastructure. NEPA makes projects vulnerable to litigation, motivating agencies to write overly long documents to defend against future lawsuits. A former general counsel at the Environmental Protection Agency once estimated that 90 percent of the details in environmental reviews are intended only to help prevent litigation.

But NEPA doesn’t just cause delays. It also creates a process that saps the political will to build big infrastructure in the first place. Take the Tappan Zee Bridge, which crosses the Hudson River north of Manhattan. In 1989, the New York State Department of Transportation decided to add high-occupancy-vehicle (HOV) lanes to the bridge. Right away, the NEPA process produced acute interagency coordination problems. Federal reviewers were unfamiliar with the design of suburb-to-suburb HOV lanes, creating lengthy delays while state and federal officials went back and forth. Then, perversely, attempts to cut costs and minimize environmental impacts by using a design for narrower lanes ended up requiring more review, because the unique details forced administrators to do further analysis.

By 1995, after years of added details and scope creep, the cost of the HOV expansion had grown by 75 percent. But officials felt trapped. The state’s Department of Transportation had already approved the HOV lane idea in the late 1980s, and the NEPA review was now almost finished, with $200 million in federal funding secured for the project. Canceling it then would have been a political disaster. By limiting the state to the plans described in the environmental review, NEPA tied the state’s hands, leaving it with no option but to accept the bloated project design or start over. In 1997, after the HOV lane proposal had become too costly and unpopular, Governor George Pataki scrapped it.

In 2002, the state began another NEPA review to consider alternative solutions to congestion along the corridor, including replacing the bridge. Public input massively expanded the number of alternatives, as constituents tried to accommodate their own pet projects, sometimes by threatening litigation under NEPA to force consideration of further alternatives. In 2011, when the 10,000-page review was finally completed, some of the material was so out of date that it had to be redone.

A new bridge was finally built between 2013 and 2017, for the cost of $4 billion. The way this got done was largely through Governor Andrew Cuomo’s aggressive political maneuvering that kept the burden of the NEPA process to a minimum. As Philip Mark Plotch writes in Politics Across the Hudson:

The governor’s team approached all important Tappan Zee–related decisions in the same manner. They hatched an idea, discussed it behind closed doors, and then announced a decision with little or no opportunity for public input. They had supporters make phone calls to promote the idea, and the governor’s office fought back at anyone who opposed it.

In other words, it requires remarkable political willpower to push through a big infrastructure project — a sign of a dysfunctional process that makes strongman politics appealing.

Rebuilds after a disaster are exciting because they smash the idea that planning and approval have to take years. It takes the rare moment of a public emergency for speed and efficiency to break through a regulatory thicket that feels impossible to clear. Meanwhile, NEPA remains unchanged because its defenders worry that reform will undermine the law’s genuinely important objectives.

While there is hope for a speedy rebuild of Baltimore’s Key Bridge, if it happens it may still be a one-off. True reform will have to wait for systemic changes. Disaster rebuilds help illustrate the problem, but they offer little in the way of direct solutions. Most major infrastructure projects won’t be able to dodge NEPA like the Key Bridge, or waive state regulations like the I-95 repairs. But reformers should still pay close attention, especially to the subtleties of successful rebuilds.

The I-95 repair, for example, shows the benefits of centralizing authority for regulatory approval. Governor Shapiro used his authority to act as the central point of coordination and personally ensured that agencies worked together, going so far as to keep the head of the state’s Department of Transportation on site to sign off on various decisions. A governor’s personal attention isn’t a realistic permanent solution, but reformers should take inspiration. Another durable solution might be for states to centralize state-level permitting authority and give the lead project agency authority to sign off on the relevant state and local permits.

If all goes well, a quick and efficient rebuild of the Francis Scott Key Bridge may offer similar inspiration. But the episode will also highlight the enduring problem with our nation’s permitting system: it takes a bona fide emergency to build fast.