The “swamp” that President Trump plans to clear is inhabited by hold-over big government partisans and the way over the top regulations. President Trump’s experience in the building trades has shown him how the swamp works and he 
wants to change it.
He gave a speech in early June announcing his overall plan calling for the investment of something in the range of $1 trillion of new and updated infrastructure. Excerpts from the speech are shown in the following:
“We are here today to focus on solving one of the biggest obstacles to creating this new and desperately needed infrastructure, and that is the painfully slow, costly, and time-consuming process of getting permits and approvals to build. And I also knew that from the private sector. It is a long, slow, unnecessarily burdensome process.
My administration is committed to ending these terrible delays once and for all. The excruciating wait time for permitting has inflicted enormous financial pain to cities and states all throughout our nation and has blocked many important projects from ever getting off the ground. Many, many projects are long gone because they couldn’t get permits and there was no reason for it.
For too long, America has poured trillions and trillions of dollars into rebuilding foreign countries while allowing our own country — the country that we love — and its infrastructure to fall into a state of total disrepair. We have structurally deficient bridges, clogged roads, crumbling dams and locks. Our rivers are in trouble. Our railways are aging. And chronic traffic that slows commerce and diminishes our citizens’ quality of life. Other than that, we’re doing very well.
Instead of rebuilding our country, Washington has spent decades building a dense thicket of rules, regulations and red tape. It took only 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. People don’t believe that. It took less than one year. 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.
These charts beside me are actually a simplified version of our highway permitting process. It includes 16 different approvals involving 10 different federal agencies being governed by 26 different statutes.
As one example — and this happened just 30 minutes ago — I was sitting with a great group of people responsible for their state’s economic development and roadways. All of you are in the room now. And one gentleman from Maryland was talking about an 18-mile road. And he brought with him some of the approvals that they’ve gotten and paid for. They spent $29 million for an environmental report, weighing 70 pounds and costing $24,000 per page.
We will get rid of the redundancy and duplication that wastes your time and your money. 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, whether it’s a road, whether it’s a highway, a bridge, a dam.”
Nuclear reactor that generate electricity have been so bedeviled by all the regulations that raise the cost of building so high that investors are reluctant to take a chance. If you have been around for a while you know that the green environmental machine has made nukes a target even though it essentially makes no CO2 when in operation. That they reject these units that have an excellent safety record, seems counterproductive.
It will take a lot of work to get these unnecessary systems revised. Using metaphors, lots of oxen to gore and sacred cows get rid of—thus a lot of people will be fighting Trump’s agenda. Huge, wasteful, big government is fighting back. We need to keep supporting Trump’s initiatives.
The numbers of regulations are staggering. Next posting will show how big the job of getting rid of these many regulations there are.
Read President Trump’s full speech by clicking here.
h/t Camille Paglia
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Climate Change Sanity 