Get Politicians Out of the Engineer's Chair

Americans deserve to know an uncomfortable fact: we have become one of the most expensive places on earth to build. A mile of subway, a bridge, a rail line — we pay several times what other wealthy countries pay for the same thing. It isn’t because our workers are worse or our materials cost more. It’s because we let the wrong people make the engineering decisions.

The problem has a name: political control of design

When it’s time to actually design and build something, the people in charge are too often not engineers. They’re planning commissions, appointed boards, and elected officials — many with no technical background at all — who hold veto power over choices they aren’t equipped to make.

The results are predictable and expensive:

• Endless “further study.” When a board can’t or won’t decide, the safe move is always to delay — and every month of delay adds cost.
• Design by political accommodation. Each official has a district to please, a donor to satisfy, a neighborhood demand to honor. So the route bends, the scope balloons, and features get bolted on that have nothing to do with building the thing well.
• No one accountable for the result. Authority is scattered across appointees and committees, so when a project runs years late and hundreds of millions over, there’s no one whose job was to get it right.

A project run this way isn’t really being engineered. It’s being negotiated — and the taxpayer pays for every concession.

Our approach: a hard line between what and how

Democracy belongs at the level of priorities and dollars. Expertise belongs at the level of design. So draw a bright line between them:

• Elected leaders decide what we build and how much we’ll spend — the goals, the budget, the public’s priorities. That’s their job, and they answer to voters for it.
• Qualified, accountable engineers decide how it gets built — the route, the design, the methods — and they deliver it. Full stop.

And critically: insulate that work from the planning commissions, political appointees, and campaign-driven interference that drive our costs into the stratosphere. Not because the public shouldn’t have a say — they set the mission — but because once the mission is set, second-guessing the professionals on technical decisions is exactly what makes American building so slow and so expensive.

This isn’t a knock on public servants; it’s a recognition that the engineer who has built ten transit lines should design the eleventh, not the appointed board that has built none. The countries that build beautifully and affordably all share this discipline: politicians set the envelope, professionals fill it.

We can build like that too. We just have to be willing to get out of the way.

The fuller case is in Righting the Ship.