We Raised the Empire State Building in About a Year, So Why Not a Power Line

A hundred-and-two-story skyscraper went up in less time than it now takes some agencies to decide whether a transmission line needs another study. If you want a one-sentence summary of what has gone wrong with American building, there it is. We did not lose the ability to pour concrete. We lost the ability to be allowed to.

I mean that as good news, believe it or not. A country whose problem is engineering has a long road ahead. A country whose problem is paperwork can fix it in a session of Congress. So let me take you through a few things America built, in order, with dates, and then show you what changed.

The Empire State Building

Start in New York. Construction of the Empire State Building began on March 17, 1930. The building opened on May 1, 1931. Let me show the arithmetic. From March 17, 1930 to March 17, 1931 is 365 days. From March 17 to May 1 is another 45 days. So the structure went from groundbreaking to ribbon cutting in about 410 days, a little over thirteen months.

It stood 102 stories tall and was the tallest building in the world for roughly four decades. It rose through the first years of the Great Depression, when a half-finished building was better than an idle crew, and the pace was astonishing. The steel went up in a rhythm that crews ran like a production line, with trucks arriving at precise times and materials hoisted straight into place.

Now, I am not claiming that every building should be raised at that speed or that working conditions in 1930 were something to copy. Safety standards are much stronger now, and that is a good thing. The point is narrower. The technology of the era was a fraction of ours, with no computers, no modern cranes and no digital design tools, and the project still finished in about a year. The delay we face today is not a technology delay.

Hoover Dam

Move west. The Boulder Canyon Project Act of 1928 authorized the dam on the Colorado River, in the canyon on the border between Nevada and Arizona. Construction began in 1931 and the work was finished in 1936, ahead of the schedule that had been set. President Roosevelt dedicated it in September 1935, with the dam essentially complete the following spring.

Think about what that involved: diverting an entire river through tunnels, pouring millions of cubic yards of concrete in sections, cooling the concrete with refrigerated water so it would set properly, and housing thousands of workers in the desert. It was a vast project, and it was done in about five years. It still produces electricity today, and it still stands as a monument to what a determined country can do.

The tragic side belongs in the story too. Men died building it, and a free people should honour their work and remember the cost. But no one can read the record and conclude that the nation of the 1930s lacked engineering skill. It had skill and it had permission.

The Pentagon

Now to a building built in a hurry for a reason. Ground was broken for the Pentagon on September 11, 1941. The building was dedicated, and substantially complete, on January 15, 1943. Count the months: from September 1941 to January 1943 is sixteen months. It remains one of the largest office buildings in the world, with about six and a half million square feet of floor space, and it was designed and built as the nation went to war.

That is the point of this entry. When the country decided something was urgent, it could build quickly. The urgency was not an excuse to ignore the law, and the work was done within the framework of the time. It was done because the process did not offer a thousand ways to stop it.

Bridges and Highways

Two more entries, so no one says I picked a lucky handful. The Golden Gate Bridge, a daunting engineering challenge across that swift, foggy strait, began construction on January 5, 1933 and opened to pedestrians on May 27, 1937, with vehicle traffic starting the next day. That is four years and a bit, for a span that was then the longest suspension bridge in the world, built across open water with strong currents, and built by a local district that sold its own bonds.

Then the highways. The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, which President Eisenhower signed in June of that year, authorized the Interstate system, a network planned at roughly 41,000 miles. It was financed by a dedicated fuel tax flowing into a trust fund, which meant the people who drove paid for the roads they drove on. Whatever you think of every routing decision, and some neighbourhoods were treated badly, the country laid down a continental network in a generation. It did not have to ask for permission from a dozen separate agencies, because the process had not yet grown a dozen separate veto points.

Notice the pattern in all five stories. A clear purpose, a clear funding source, a clear decision by an accountable body and a short path from decision to shovel. Subtract any of those and the result is the maze. Add them back and the speed returns. That is not nostalgia. It is a checklist.

What Changed: 1970

So what happened? In my view the story turns on a date, January 1, 1970, when the National Environmental Policy Act became law. I want to be fair to it. NEPA was a bipartisan statute, signed by President Nixon, passed with good intentions, and its core idea sounds reasonable: before a federal agency takes a major action that significantly affects the environment, it should study the consequences and tell the public.

The trouble is not the idea. It is what the idea turned into. Over the decades, "study the consequences" became a documents industry. A federal environmental impact statement could run to hundreds of pages and take years, and each document invited a lawsuit over whether it was adequate. Courts, asked to review the documents, imposed more demands, and agencies responded by writing longer ones to be safe. Layer upon that the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act permits, state reviews, tribal consultation and local zoning, and you have a system in which any one of a dozen agencies can slow a project, and any one of a dozen plaintiffs can sue.

Here is how I would put the problem. In the old system, the question was: can this be built? In the new one, the question is: has every conceivable objection been documented, answered and defended against a court challenge? Those are different questions, and the second one has no natural stopping point.

The Alaska Pipeline: A Test Case

The best illustration is the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Oil was found at Prudhoe Bay on Alaska's North Slope in 1968, and the oil companies proposed an 800-mile pipeline across the state to the ice-free port of Valdez. Then came the lawsuits. In 1970 a federal court blocked the permits, in litigation over environmental review and federal land rules, and the project sat tied up for years while the legal fight ran.

What broke the logjam was Congress. After the 1973 oil embargo made the need for domestic oil impossible to ignore, Congress passed the Trans-Alaska Pipeline Authorization Act, which President Nixon signed on November 16, 1973. The Act authorized the pipeline and, in effect, limited further court challenges based on the environmental statute. Construction began in 1974, and oil began flowing through the line in 1977.

Look at the lesson. The pipeline got built, and it has operated for decades. Congress made a decision, in the open, by statute. Congress did the one thing that the process could not do for itself: it decided. And that is exactly what the Constitution intends. Article I, Section 1 vests "All legislative Powers" in Congress, and a project of national importance is a legislative question. When Congress answered it, the project moved.

The Modern Maze

Now compare it with the way we build a power line. A major transmission line that crosses several states needs approvals from federal agencies for the land it crosses, state utility commissions in each state it enters, local governments for the right-of-way, and environmental reviews at each level. Landowners who object can sue, and environmental groups can sue, and sometimes the same line is challenged by people who want it moved and by others who want it stopped. Projects that were first proposed many years ago are still waiting.

This matters now more than ever, because the electrical grid is the one piece of infrastructure the country needs more of, whatever energy mix you favour. If you want more wind and solar, you need lines to bring the power from remote places to cities. If you want more nuclear and gas, you need lines to carry it. If you want data centres and factories, you need connection. A country that cannot build a power line cannot build any of it. For the related question of why a once-reliable grid has become a worry, see Seven Things People Said About the Texas Blackout of 2021, Tested.

In 2023, Congress did take a step. The Fiscal Responsibility Act amended NEPA to set page limits on environmental documents and deadlines for completing them, with shorter clocks for simpler reviews and longer ones for complex projects. That was a reform that conservatives and some Democrats supported, and it was long overdue. But a page limit is a small repair to a large machine. The deeper problem, the number of separate veto points, remains.

The Strongest Case for Review

I want to give the other side its due, because it is not a foolish case. Review exists because the people of the past made mistakes. A highway cut through a neighbourhood, a dam flooded a valley, a plant poisoned a river. The public learned that decisions made fast and without consultation sometimes caused harm that was hard to undo. A system that forces agencies to look before they leap, and gives citizens a right to be heard, is a good thing in principle.

I agree with all of that. Let me answer it in four points.

1. Review is not the same as veto. A process that asks "what are the effects?" is reasonable. A process that lets any one objector halt a project for a decade is not review at all. It is a veto without a vote.
2. Delay has costs too. The environmental cost of not building is real. A transmission line that is not built means a dirty power plant that stays open, a pipeline that is not built means oil on trains, and a house that is not built means someone sleeping in a car. Those costs rarely appear in an environmental impact statement.
3. Cost without accountability. Review layers add expense, and the expense is passed on to ratepayers and taxpayers. Nobody votes on the cost of delay, and it is invisible on the page.
4. Better tools exist. Clear deadlines, a single lead agency, limits on the time to sue, and a presumption that a project approved after one thorough review stays approved would protect the public without freezing the economy.

Review should inform. It should not substitute for a decision. When it does, power drifts from the elected branches to a mix of agencies, litigators and judges, which is precisely the drift the Founders warned about.

Why This Is a Conservative Cause

You might wonder why this belongs to the right. Conservatives are supposed to like old things, after all. But the conservative case is deep. A conservative believes in the rule of law, which means rules that are clear, predictable and the same for everyone. He believes in the dignity of work, which includes building things. He believes that those who bear a cost should have a voice, and that decisions should be made by people who answer to voters. The modern permitting regime violates all of those. It is unclear, because a project can be re-litigated for years. It is unpredictable, because a permit granted can be revoked. It hands power to the best-funded objectors, and it moves decisions out of reach of the ballot.

It is also a matter of national strength. A country that cannot build a bridge, a plant or a line quickly cannot defend itself, grow or compete. The people who raised the Pentagon in sixteen months were not reckless. They understood that speed can be a form of seriousness. For the larger economy of what it costs when government layers on cost, see Low-Flow Toilets and Banned Bulbs, How Washington Moved Into Your House, and for the story of a conservation tradition that built as well as protected, see Theodore Roosevelt Made Conservation a Conservative Cause, and It Still Is.

What Fixes Look Like

• One lead agency per project, with authority to coordinate the rest and a hard deadline for a decision.
• Short statutes of limitations on lawsuits, so that a decision stays decided.
• Page and time limits that are real and enforced, extending the 2023 reform.
• Fewer separate vetoes, especially for transmission lines that cross state lines and serve the national grid.
• Counting the cost of delay in every review, so that the price of not building is visible.
• Congress deciding the large questions, as it did in 1973, rather than leaving them to the courts.

For the pipeline side of this problem, see Pipe, Rail or Truck, Comparing the Ways to Move a Barrel of Oil Safely.

The Case in Brief

1. The Empire State Building rose in about 410 days between March 1930 and May 1931, Hoover Dam was finished in 1936 and the Pentagon in about sixteen months, all with far less technology than we have.
2. The change since 1970 is less engineering than the layers of environmental review, permits and lawsuits that now stand between a project and its start.
3. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline got built after Congress decided the question by statute in 1973, which shows that clear decisions by elected representatives work.
4. Review that informs is good, but review that works as a veto without a vote is a drift of power from the voters to agencies and courts.
5. Reform means one lead agency, hard deadlines, short windows to sue and counting the cost of delay.

What you can do: Find your state public utility commission's website, look up any pending transmission or pipeline case in your area, and file a short public comment on the schedule and the cost of delay.