The chapter opens with Tahanan, a San Francisco supportive-housing building finished in 2021: 145 studios built in three years for under $400,000 per unit, far faster and cheaper than typical Bay Area affordable housing. It succeeded partly because Scott Wiener’s 2017 state law fast-tracked entitlements, but especially because private financing let the developers avoid many public-funding requirements. Rebecca Foster describes how local contracting, hiring, design, and disability reviews—often layered atop existing federal standards—create months of delay and costly ripple effects; even modular construction triggered conflict with local labor priorities.

The author argues the usual “big government vs. small government” framing misses the real issue: state capacity, or whether government can achieve its goals. Liberal jurisdictions often add rules that raise costs and slow construction, pushing even private developers toward luxury projects that can survive long timelines. Los Angeles’s Proposition HHH, meant to build 10,000 homeless-housing units, illustrates how public money can come with delays, higher standards, and complex financing stacks; Yasmin Tong and Ron Galperin describe a system where multiple funders, audits, prevailing-wage and green requirements, and neighborhood lawsuits inflate costs and slow delivery. Heidi Marston’s experience at LAHSA shows how constrained funding and constant oversight can leave agencies unable to spend large budgets effectively.

The chapter then generalizes this pattern as “everything-bagel liberalism”: piling additional goals and procedures onto each project until outcomes collapse, as with California high-speed rail. Federal industrial policy under the CHIPS and Science Act is presented similarly: the Notice of Funding Opportunity adds extensive expectations (equity, child care, supplier diversity, environmental review, community investments) without explicitly grappling with trade-offs. The same dynamic helped shape high-speed rail’s early Central Valley focus because federal preferences rewarded particular co-benefits, even if that choice weakened the project’s chances of completion.

The argument broadens to administrative capacity: spending has grown while the federal workforce has not, and Democrats often act as if government should be small by outsourcing expertise. California high-speed rail is criticized for relying heavily on consultants, while BART’s railcar procurement improved when more engineering work was done in-house; research is cited suggesting more public-sector staffing can reduce infrastructure costs. Jen Pahlka’s account of California’s Employment Development Department during the pandemic shows how “sedimentary” layers of old technology and accumulated rules, plus procurement constraints and political incentives, produced a massive backlog and perverse responses (like hiring thousands who could not be trained quickly and eventually shutting the application portal), revealing the need for subtraction as well as addition.

The chapter closes with a counterexample: Pennsylvania’s rapid I-95 rebuild after a 2023 tanker fire. Governor Josh Shapiro’s emergency declaration waived normal procedures, enabled no-bid contracting, and prioritized speed while still using union labor; Transportation Secretary Mike Carroll describes empowered managers taking calculated risks, and the bridge reopened in twelve days. The author argues that legitimacy should come less from rigid process compliance and more from results, urging a politics that restores discretion, reduces veto points, and rebuilds government’s ability to deliver.