8 ms·

U.S. Agencies Agree to Slash Approval Times for Infrastructure Projects

169 points by gok 9y ago

verandaguy_alt 9y ago
Is it appropriate to be concerned that this will result in infrastructure being approved without sufficient review, potentially resulting in dangerous infrastructure?
- lainga 9y ago
  From TFA, it says that the delays are due to the various agencies involved (Depts. of Interior, Commerce, Homeland Security, EPA, FERC) doing their reviews sequentially. Now they will do them concurrently. I imagine that if one agency needed information from another, they could ask for it (rather than waiting for it and n other intermediate review processes to end). Otherwise, it looks like the diligence involved should be the same.
- coldacid 9y ago
  It's pretty much just mandating a parallel review process instead of serial.
- chrisseaton 9y ago
  How do we know what the sufficient time for review is? Maybe it was too much before - maybe it still isn't sufficient. Who knows?
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago
  No. The same processes that were run in serial will be run in parallel.
  - cle 9y ago
    That's honestly not very reassuring at face value. Concurrency is hard...
    - pg_bot 9y ago
      Our entire economy is based on people being able to tasks while other people do other tasks. Concurrency is everywhere and we seem to manage just fine.
    - jlarocco 9y ago
      That comment doesn't make sense in this situation. The different agencies review and approve different things, so there should be little or no overlap.
pzone 9y ago
It sounds to me like this is about the minimizing redundency, and switching to concurrent rather than sequential review. The environmental protection laws underpinning these reviews are unchanged. It seems like an honest attempt to improve the functioning of government, independent of ideology.
- oftenwrong 9y ago
  We can't even say it will improve the functioning of the government; it will just make the government faster. Faster at doing good things, or faster at doing bad things. The US government doesn't always make good choices when it comes to infrastructure investments. For example: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/2/five-ways-federal-infrastructure-spending-makes-cities-poorer https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/2/five-ways-feder...
  - burlesona 9y ago
    My 2 cents is that a faster approvals cycle will lead to more private sector activity which should help increase the productivity of investments. Even for public sector stuff, in many cases the cost is greatly inflated by the regulatory delay. Or to put it another way, I’m pretty wary of federal infra projects in general but I don’t think there’s a compelling argument in favor of slower regulatory review.
    - chiefalchemist 9y ago
      Well said.
  - musage 9y ago
    What we can say with 100% certainty however is that when there's an article about some shop increasing thoughput by X%, we never talk about how that just allows them to shovel more marketing faster. Or imagine "show HN: static site generator made with A and B" being met with "most of your blog entries aren't that good though".
  - surfmike 9y ago
forapurpose 9y ago
Before you tear down a fence, learn why it was built in the first place. The real question is, why were approvals processed in serial? It's very possible that the input for some reviews requires the output from others, for example. Think of an analogy: If someone said 'we'll speed up X software by running it concurrently', you'd have a lot of questions before you believed it. I've seen this mistake before. For example, when the F-35 was being planned people had lots of similarly 'obvious' cost-saving and time-saving ideas: Instead of all these different services and countries buying different planes, why not all buy a common plane and get enormous economy of scale in production, maintenance, training, etc.? Instead of doing the waterfall method and locking in all the specs and developing all the tech before production, why not do it more iteratively, save time and get other benefits? We learned the answers: 1. It's hard enough to meet the demanding (existential) requirements and bleeding edge tech development needs of one service; building one solution to please 3 services and a dozen countries is impossible. 2. That works for software, not $100 million hardware. I'm not saying it's a bad idea; I'm saying that we don't know and that the reason for the fence is the interesting, valuable information.
- throwaway84742 9y ago
  I bet that if powers that be decided not to unify F35, we’d end up with 3 specialized stealth fighter projects costing $1T each, and without the ability to stockpile just one set of parts for sustained maintenance.
  - philwelch 9y ago
    The Air Force and Navy both need (or want) a light, stealthy fighter-bomber. Historically, there's no good reason not to just make the Air Force use the same planes the Navy does. They just never actually agree on which plane they want and it's easier to let both services have their own way. The only tricky part is that the Marines need a STOVL close-air-support bomber to replace the Harrier, and the Royal Navy needs a STOVL fighter-bomber to replace the Harrier since they don't have full-sized carriers. There's some commonality between those requirements and the Navy/Air Force requirements--there's some rationale for stealthy CAS planes, and your STOVL plane needs to be a full-featured fighter-bomber for the Brits to want it anyway--but STOVL is a lot more complex than normal horizontal flight.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
chiefalchemist 9y ago
If the improvement is aiming for 2 years, what is it now? I understand that some of these things are broad and / complex, but dragging it out only dates the discovery process. At the very least, phase the projects. That said, what about completion time? Can that be effected in some positive way? Or will it continue to be bid low and just keep tacking on the overuns?
plussed_reader 9y ago
I'm sure eliminating environmental surveys will greatly speed up project approval time. Pruitt can do it!
- lainga 9y ago
  Where is eliminating (not streamlining) any of the approval steps mentioned in the article?
  - maxxxxx 9y ago
    There is certainly some reason to be skeptical of the real intent and implementation of this change by the current administration but we'll have to see.
  - jadedhacker 9y ago
    If you expect the current administration to deliver anything you can expect it to do it with less thinking and more impulse. Trump has said he regards infrastructure as a very popular sweetner. You should be extremely skeptical and watch for the thing it's sweetening.
kristianp 9y ago
Requires registration to read.
adventured 9y ago
Speaking of infrastructure. Does anyone know the current status of the "dig once" rule (contained in the Ray Baum Act) as it pertains to the US Senate? It passed through the House in early March. I can't seem to locate any information about it after that. Supposedly it was due to easily sail through the Senate. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/03/dig-once-rule-requiring-fiber-deployment-is-finally-set-to-become-us-law/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/03/dig-once-rule-re... https://eshoo.house.gov/issues/telecommunications/eshoo-applauds-passage-of-ray-baums-act/ https://eshoo.house.gov/issues/telecommunications/eshoo-appl...
fallingfrog 9y ago
This is a great idea. Improve latency without affecting throughput (much).
ChuckMcM 9y ago
I wonder if this will help unblock federal funding for the California High Speed Rail project.
- DrScump 9y ago
  What Federal funding are you referring to?
  - ChuckMcM 9y ago
    See http://atrn.assembly.ca.gov/sites/atrn.assembly.ca.gov/files/HSR%20Funding%20Chart%20FINAL.pdf http://atrn.assembly.ca.gov/sites/atrn.assembly.ca.gov/files... for a map of their funding. I was looking at the Silicon Valley to Bakersfield leg which is dependent on $2.9B in federal funds which, to date, congress has been opposed to. I believe that a working high speed rail system will help make working in California more affordable if it is practical to live outside the metro areas of the Bay Area and LA and still work there. I also expect it will cut down on traffic fatalities on I-5.
pasbesoin 9y ago
This may be a bit meta. Everything I've read about Trump's infrastructure initiative leads me to believe it is planned as a largely unfunded mandate cum strong outsourcing and privatization initiative. The Federal government isn't going to pay for much of anything. They're telling states to "get it done" and pushing strongly for privatization of public resources as a means of paying for this. (Think Illinois' Skyway, other toll roads that never met their schedules for shutting down payments to investors and going public, Chicago's public parking garages and parking meters, and many examples farther afield.) While public projects aren't perfect, this inserts (even more of) a profit motive into overall management, and in practice often ends up providing "less for more". Rather than some supposedly more efficient management, such privatization initiatives seem more often to merely introduce another middle-man -- one having unprecedented control and no competition. There's a lot of money sloshing around the investment world, looking for "tangible assets" with strong and highly predictable and controllable rates of return. Hedge funds are moving into real estate and rentals. Sovereign wealth funds have wanted a piece of Chicago's infrastructure-based revenue streams. Canadian and other housing prices exploding with foreign investment. As for "rushing things along", we have a prime example of this and perhaps forerunner of this Federal initiative, with FoxConn in Wisconsin. Things already seem to be going significantly wrong: http://beltmag.com/blighted-by-foxconn/ http://beltmag.com/blighted-by-foxconn/ So, I don't really see this initiative as an honest effort to improve efficiencies while maintaining current regulation -- regulation that, for its sometimes faults, was usually put into place for good reason and is better than the alternative it replaced. I see it as an initiative to expedite the enrichment of large private interests who have the current administration's ear -- as well as those of many state and some local governments. (Local is sometimes harder, because you're dealing with people who will directly have to live with the consequences. Once they realize that the people who are on board are selling the rest out.)
kup0 9y ago
Making the agencies do their reviews in parallel seems like a safe way to speed up the approval/review process. I know we tend to be cynical about any change like this in government processes, but I'm trying to have some (IMHO reasonable) hope here. I tend to skew very left politically, but I'm having a hard time seeing Democrats/Enviro groups' opposition to this as anything but strictly political. They often champion the idea that government can work and do so efficiently. For once I'd like to see them support an effort to do just that.

169 points by gok 9y ago

Is it appropriate to be concerned that this will result in infrastructure being approved without sufficient review, potentially resulting in dangerous infrastructure?

lainga 9y ago
From TFA, it says that the delays are due to the various agencies involved (Depts. of Interior, Commerce, Homeland Security, EPA, FERC) doing their reviews sequentially. Now they will do them concurrently. I imagine that if one agency needed information from another, they could ask for it (rather than waiting for it and n other intermediate review processes to end). Otherwise, it looks like the diligence involved should be the same.
coldacid 9y ago
It's pretty much just mandating a parallel review process instead of serial.
chrisseaton 9y ago
How do we know what the sufficient time for review is? Maybe it was too much before - maybe it still isn't sufficient. Who knows?
dsfyu404ed 9y ago
No. The same processes that were run in serial will be run in parallel.
- cle 9y ago
  That's honestly not very reassuring at face value. Concurrency is hard...
  - pg_bot 9y ago
    Our entire economy is based on people being able to tasks while other people do other tasks. Concurrency is everywhere and we seem to manage just fine.
  - jlarocco 9y ago
    That comment doesn't make sense in this situation. The different agencies review and approve different things, so there should be little or no overlap.

pzone 9y ago

It sounds to me like this is about the minimizing redundency, and switching to concurrent rather than sequential review. The environmental protection laws underpinning these reviews are unchanged. It seems like an honest attempt to improve the functioning of government, independent of ideology.

oftenwrong 9y ago
We can't even say it will improve the functioning of the government; it will just make the government faster. Faster at doing good things, or faster at doing bad things. The US government doesn't always make good choices when it comes to infrastructure investments. For example: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/2/five-ways-federal-infrastructure-spending-makes-cities-poorer https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/2/five-ways-feder...
- burlesona 9y ago
  My 2 cents is that a faster approvals cycle will lead to more private sector activity which should help increase the productivity of investments. Even for public sector stuff, in many cases the cost is greatly inflated by the regulatory delay. Or to put it another way, I’m pretty wary of federal infra projects in general but I don’t think there’s a compelling argument in favor of slower regulatory review.
  - chiefalchemist 9y ago
    Well said.
- musage 9y ago
  What we can say with 100% certainty however is that when there's an article about some shop increasing thoughput by X%, we never talk about how that just allows them to shovel more marketing faster. Or imagine "show HN: static site generator made with A and B" being met with "most of your blog entries aren't that good though".
- surfmike 9y ago

forapurpose 9y ago

Before you tear down a fence, learn why it was built in the first place. The real question is, why were approvals processed in serial? It's very possible that the input for some reviews requires the output from others, for example. Think of an analogy: If someone said 'we'll speed up X software by running it concurrently', you'd have a lot of questions before you believed it. I've seen this mistake before. For example, when the F-35 was being planned people had lots of similarly 'obvious' cost-saving and time-saving ideas: Instead of all these different services and countries buying different planes, why not all buy a common plane and get enormous economy of scale in production, maintenance, training, etc.? Instead of doing the waterfall method and locking in all the specs and developing all the tech before production, why not do it more iteratively, save time and get other benefits? We learned the answers: 1. It's hard enough to meet the demanding (existential) requirements and bleeding edge tech development needs of one service; building one solution to please 3 services and a dozen countries is impossible. 2. That works for software, not $100 million hardware. I'm not saying it's a bad idea; I'm saying that we don't know and that the reason for the fence is the interesting, valuable information.

throwaway84742 9y ago
I bet that if powers that be decided not to unify F35, we’d end up with 3 specialized stealth fighter projects costing $1T each, and without the ability to stockpile just one set of parts for sustained maintenance.
- philwelch 9y ago
  The Air Force and Navy both need (or want) a light, stealthy fighter-bomber. Historically, there's no good reason not to just make the Air Force use the same planes the Navy does. They just never actually agree on which plane they want and it's easier to let both services have their own way. The only tricky part is that the Marines need a STOVL close-air-support bomber to replace the Harrier, and the Royal Navy needs a STOVL fighter-bomber to replace the Harrier since they don't have full-sized carriers. There's some commonality between those requirements and the Navy/Air Force requirements--there's some rationale for stealthy CAS planes, and your STOVL plane needs to be a full-featured fighter-bomber for the Brits to want it anyway--but STOVL is a lot more complex than normal horizontal flight.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

chiefalchemist 9y ago

If the improvement is aiming for 2 years, what is it now? I understand that some of these things are broad and / complex, but dragging it out only dates the discovery process. At the very least, phase the projects. That said, what about completion time? Can that be effected in some positive way? Or will it continue to be bid low and just keep tacking on the overuns?

plussed_reader 9y ago

I'm sure eliminating environmental surveys will greatly speed up project approval time. Pruitt can do it!

lainga 9y ago
Where is eliminating (not streamlining) any of the approval steps mentioned in the article?
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  There is certainly some reason to be skeptical of the real intent and implementation of this change by the current administration but we'll have to see.
- jadedhacker 9y ago
  If you expect the current administration to deliver anything you can expect it to do it with less thinking and more impulse. Trump has said he regards infrastructure as a very popular sweetner. You should be extremely skeptical and watch for the thing it's sweetening.

kristianp 9y ago

Requires registration to read.

adventured 9y ago

Speaking of infrastructure. Does anyone know the current status of the "dig once" rule (contained in the Ray Baum Act) as it pertains to the US Senate? It passed through the House in early March. I can't seem to locate any information about it after that. Supposedly it was due to easily sail through the Senate. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/03/dig-once-rule-requiring-fiber-deployment-is-finally-set-to-become-us-law/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/03/dig-once-rule-re... https://eshoo.house.gov/issues/telecommunications/eshoo-applauds-passage-of-ray-baums-act/ https://eshoo.house.gov/issues/telecommunications/eshoo-appl...

fallingfrog 9y ago

This is a great idea. Improve latency without affecting throughput (much).

ChuckMcM 9y ago

I wonder if this will help unblock federal funding for the California High Speed Rail project.

DrScump 9y ago
What Federal funding are you referring to?
- ChuckMcM 9y ago
  See http://atrn.assembly.ca.gov/sites/atrn.assembly.ca.gov/files/HSR%20Funding%20Chart%20FINAL.pdf http://atrn.assembly.ca.gov/sites/atrn.assembly.ca.gov/files... for a map of their funding. I was looking at the Silicon Valley to Bakersfield leg which is dependent on $2.9B in federal funds which, to date, congress has been opposed to. I believe that a working high speed rail system will help make working in California more affordable if it is practical to live outside the metro areas of the Bay Area and LA and still work there. I also expect it will cut down on traffic fatalities on I-5.

pasbesoin 9y ago

This may be a bit meta. Everything I've read about Trump's infrastructure initiative leads me to believe it is planned as a largely unfunded mandate cum strong outsourcing and privatization initiative. The Federal government isn't going to pay for much of anything. They're telling states to "get it done" and pushing strongly for privatization of public resources as a means of paying for this. (Think Illinois' Skyway, other toll roads that never met their schedules for shutting down payments to investors and going public, Chicago's public parking garages and parking meters, and many examples farther afield.) While public projects aren't perfect, this inserts (even more of) a profit motive into overall management, and in practice often ends up providing "less for more". Rather than some supposedly more efficient management, such privatization initiatives seem more often to merely introduce another middle-man -- one having unprecedented control and no competition. There's a lot of money sloshing around the investment world, looking for "tangible assets" with strong and highly predictable and controllable rates of return. Hedge funds are moving into real estate and rentals. Sovereign wealth funds have wanted a piece of Chicago's infrastructure-based revenue streams. Canadian and other housing prices exploding with foreign investment. As for "rushing things along", we have a prime example of this and perhaps forerunner of this Federal initiative, with FoxConn in Wisconsin. Things already seem to be going significantly wrong: http://beltmag.com/blighted-by-foxconn/ http://beltmag.com/blighted-by-foxconn/ So, I don't really see this initiative as an honest effort to improve efficiencies while maintaining current regulation -- regulation that, for its sometimes faults, was usually put into place for good reason and is better than the alternative it replaced. I see it as an initiative to expedite the enrichment of large private interests who have the current administration's ear -- as well as those of many state and some local governments. (Local is sometimes harder, because you're dealing with people who will directly have to live with the consequences. Once they realize that the people who are on board are selling the rest out.)

kup0 9y ago

Making the agencies do their reviews in parallel seems like a safe way to speed up the approval/review process. I know we tend to be cynical about any change like this in government processes, but I'm trying to have some (IMHO reasonable) hope here. I tend to skew very left politically, but I'm having a hard time seeing Democrats/Enviro groups' opposition to this as anything but strictly political. They often champion the idea that government can work and do so efficiently. For once I'd like to see them support an effort to do just that.