Why Can’t California Do Anything?

Authored by Stephen Soukup via American Greatness,

Just over two months ago, the Rand Corporation released a study on the cost of producing multi-family housing in three states: California, Colorado, and Texas.

The results were paradoxically shocking, yet utterly predictable.

California, it turns out, is a ridiculous place, run by ridiculous people, with ridiculous regulations. Or, as the folks at Rand put it, “The average market-rate apartment in California is roughly two and a half times the cost of a similar apartment constructed in Texas on a square-foot basis—and regional differences within California, where costs in the San Francisco Bay Area are roughly 50 percent higher than costs in San Diego.” Additionally, “[t]he time to bring a project to completion in California is more than 22 months longer than the average time required in Texas.” According to Rand, the culprit for these grotesque disparities is, to no one’s surprise, the differences in regulatory burdens between Texas and California and between various jurisdictions within the (allegedly) Golden State.

Earlier this month, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy was forced to issue a threat to the government of California, warning the state that the federal government was considering rescinding future funding for its high-speed rail boondoggle. According to a department report, the federal government had released more than $7 billion to California for the project over the last several years, and it had, unsurprisingly, spent all of the money, yet somehow managed not to lay even a single foot of track. As The New York Post noted at the time, “the 800-mile rail line was supposed to be completed in two phases on a $33 billion budget by 2020.” Nevertheless, the proposed line has now been abbreviated to a mere 119 miles. Its budget has ballooned to nearly $130 billion, and it appears highly unlikely that it will be completed by its new 2033 deadline.

Meanwhile, the Mumbai-Ahmedabad High-Speed Rail project—in India, for crying out loud—began planning in 2014 and is moving along quite nicely. According to Newsweek, India Railways “reported that as of June 2025, more than 300 kilometers of elevated viaduct structures had been completed….Fourteen river bridges, seven steel bridges, and five prestressed concrete bridges are now finished.” More to the point, the project, which will span nearly 600 km, is expected to be fully completed by 2030 at the cost of a mere $15 billion.

As it turns out, when it comes to building things, California is not only not competitive with Texas, but it’s also not competitive with India, an actual, real-life Third World country. Once the economic engine that drove the nation, California is now an anchor, dragging everyone and everything down with it into the mire.

All of that said, it’s probably not fair to single out California here. These days, no American state—no city, no county, not even the federal government—could build a high-speed railroad on budget and on schedule. The federal government, with its massive military budget, struggles to build ships. Heck, it struggles even to maintain the ones it has. America just doesn’t build things or complete large, complex projects anymore. Or at least it doesn’t do them well or effectively. We used to build things, but we don’t anymore. Once upon a time—and not that long ago—we built the greatest system of roads ever known to man, spanning the entire continent, east-to-west and north-to-south. Now, the interstate system would never even be started, much less finished. Somehow, sometime along the way, American governments at all levels lost their ability to do or build much of anything.

The biggest part of the problem here can be summed up in one word: “bureaucracy.” Now, I know that just two weeks ago, in these very pages, I wrote that “For all the criticism it receives, bureaucracy remains the most rational and effective organizational structure known to man for the effective and efficient operation of large systems.” While this remains inarguably true, American government bureaucracy seems not to operate at all. It appears irrational, ineffective, and, at times, totally dysfunctional. But why?

The good news is that the problem with American bureaucracy is actually fairly easily diagnosed. The bad news is that this “problem” is entrenched in American administrative practice and is unlikely to be excised without concerted and prolonged effort.

In 1948, Dwight Waldo, an American political scientist, penned his magnum opus, a book titled The Administrative State. Waldo’s primary goal was to undermine the “neutrality” of American bureaucracy, to subvert the Wilsonian “politics-administration dichotomy” that had been characteristic of American administration since Woodrow Wilson famously expounded on its ideal characteristics. The dichotomy aligned American bureaucracy with Weberian theory and made the American administrative state like all others. It was imperfect, to say the least, mostly because it was undemocratic, but at least it worked. Until Waldo came along, that is.

The problem was that Waldo’s main objection to the politics-administration dichotomy was not based on the fact that it was undemocratic. Rather, his objection was to the idea that administration could be neutral or “scientific.” He believed that it was impossible, in the application of administration, to distinguish between “value” and “fact.” What this meant in practice was that “effective” administrators would not be able to act neutrally, in Waldo’s vision, as they did everywhere else. Instead, they would have to apply their “values” to bureaucratic decision-making. This, in turn, was taken as a license by administrators and, more to the point, those who taught administrators to become values advocates, supporters of the application of largely left-leaning values to the administration of the state.

In 2018, on the 70th anniversary of The Administrative State and the 50th anniversary of Waldo’s famous Minnowbrook Conference, the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, remembered the man and his contributions, noting that “Waldo’s 1948 book challenged the idea that public administration is value-neutral, performed in a dispassionate, almost mechanical manner. He argued that public servants should become active, informed, politically savvy agents of change” [emphasis added]. George Frederickson, a public administration professor at the University of Kansas and the organizer of the “Minnowbrook II” conference in 1988, told the Maxwell School magazine that Waldo’s contributions included “three lasting themes in PA: social equity; democratic administration; and proactive, advocating, non-neutral public administration.” In short, Waldo changed everything.

By the late 1960s, it had become accepted practice, but only in the United States, for public administrators to see themselves as value advocates and social justice warriors. And within a decade or so, that attitude had become profoundly ingrained among bureaucracies at all levels of government, throughout the country. Unsurprisingly, not long thereafter, American governments became incapable of doing much of anything.

The Waldo-revolution turned what should have been executive-dependent, value-neutral, efficient bureaucracies into left-wing social justice machines. Not only does that explain the American bureaucracy’s overall dysfunction, but it also explains why politically left-leaning jurisdictions like California are even worse off than most places. Just as with their politicians, their bureaucrats adhere to different values—or cling to the same values more firmly and unrelentingly—making everything dysfunctional to the point of collapse.

The bottom line is that if the United States wants to compete in the twenty-first century, it will have to do something about its bureaucracies. The administrative state is massive and overgrown, to be sure, but more than that, it’s guided by its own values, which render it hopelessly ineffective and, ironically, radically undemocratic. Cutting it—at all levels—would be a start, but it won’t be the end. The whole concept has to be reformed from top to bottom, with the application of “social equity” and other highly subjective values purged from both practice and theory.