President Obama and his team of White House advisors are wrong: no additional federal funding is needed to stimulate a federal construction boom that would launch job-creation in cities across the United States. What is needed, desperately, is no-cost, regulatory reform of the existing federal building process. Currently, the average cycle to conceive, design, fund and ultimately construct a federal building takes approximately 7 years. That’s just too long.
Few infrastructure projects move quickly through the federal government’s labyrinthine process because there are approximately twenty regulated hurdles that must be cleared before a project is considered "shovel ready".
As the Administrator of the U.S. General Services Administration during the Bush Administration, I had responsibility for building, maintaining, and managing approximately $550 billion in government hard assets, so I know all too well that the current, bureaucratic, approval process needlessly delays federal construction projects, creates confusion and anger among legislators with projects in their districts and, ultimately, drives up the cost to taxpayers.
American taxpayers were promised that the “critical infrastructure projects” to be funded by the $787 Billion-dollar, February 2009 stimulus were going to invigorate the economy and create 3.5 million jobs. But that didn’t happen. Tellingly, the most recent Bureau of Labor unemployment report for August 2010 shows unemployment has risen to 9.6% and that 15 million Americans are out of work.
Americans keep assembling more data points on the myth of the Obama Administration’s success, such as a stimulus that didn’t stimulate, mortgage reform that hasn’t solved the home mortgage crisis and job creation promises that haven’t materialized, confirming that Obama’s policies are wrong.
Obama is a charismatic man and a polished public speaker, but he has a flawed understanding of how the federal government works and how the private sector works. Obama’s job creation efforts aren’t succeeding because Obama still seems to think that articulating a policy is the same as executing a policy.
At the time of the first stimulus, with a White House filled with former Legislative bran