Left Begins to Recognize NEPA’s Role in Stimulus Failure

President Barack Obama’s $814 billion stimulus has been a tremendous objective failure. The White House promised that unemployment would never rise above 8%. But this month the unemployment rose to 9.8 percent, marking the 19th consecutive month that our nation’s unemployment rate topped 9 percent, a post–World War II record. The failure of Obama’s economic stimulus is so evident that now even the left is beginning to ask why. Former Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee member and Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson notes in his op-ed today: Part of the answer is that big government (the stimulus) was slowed by good-government requirements (environmental impact reports, competitive bidding and the like) that didn’t exist in the ’30s.  This is undeniably true. As we predicted before the stimulus was even signed into law, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) alone is red tape enough to kill the stimulative impact of any governemnt funded infrastructure project. Normally it takes a federal construction projects an average of 4.4 years to complete a NEPA review. Throw in the Clean Water Act’s section 404 requirements, and before a single shovel can hit the earth it usually takes 5.6 years for the average federal project to jump through all the normal environmental hoops...more