The kicker is right at the end: > Like Germany, the U.S. regularly shows that its current stall is ultimately a political choice. In February 2017, heavy rain

The kicker is right at the end: > Like Germany, the U.S. regularly shows that its current stall is ultimately a political choice. In February 2017, heavy rain damaged the nation’s tallest dam, Oroville Dam, creating the risk of catastrophic and deadly flooding in the Sacramento valley. Over 180,000 people living downstream along the Feather River in Northern California were evacuated from their homes. As in the current German case, the risks posed by inaction necessitated a bypassing of the usual rules. > > Within 10 days of the damage incident, Kiewit was awarded a contract. A little over two weeks later Kiewit’s team and equipment were fully mobilized at the site. After only 165 days Kiewit had brought the dam’s main spillway into working condition. It then completed a second phase where it built a 1.2 million square foot spillway—an area so large that 25 NFL regulation-sized fields could fit inside it. The combined project was completed in only 18 months. Same company, two different bureaucratic contexts. The US legal and bureaucratic system is a legacy codebase. It’s done well and continues to work but is vastly inefficient. Now, how to reboot America with a new codebase? That’s the real question…