> It only takes a decade or two if there is zero urgency and you give every rando with an axe to grind, both imaginary and real, veto power over the project.

The issue is the vetoes are layered and entrenched.

Some EPA rules makes it effectively impossible but are to varying extents actually protecting the environment, so you'd want someone who knows what they're doing to rewrite them in a way that can do both things at once. Zoning rules prohibit anyone from operating a mine there or building housing for the workers near the mine and local NIMBYs control the local zoning boards. Various OSHA regulations, state and federal mining rules, transportation rules, etc. are in the same state as the EPA ones.

There isn't any one place you can go to unbotch it all at once but getting them each to do it individually is non-trivial unless your plan is to just vaporize them all simultaneously.

If the political will is there, anything is possible, rules, regulations and laws be damned.

NASA put a human on the moon in less than 10 years in the 60s, and today it's taken then a little longer than 10 years to get a single unmanned launch up with SLS.

> If the political will is there, anything is possible, rules, regulations and laws be damned.

That's a big part of the problem. The vetoes have evolved to resist political reformists.

Most of these regulations come from unelected administrative agencies. You can swap out the President of the United States and they're still mostly the same people. The President can issue them general orders but a single elected individual doesn't have the bandwidth to drill down into all the specifics in all the agencies, even though that's what it'd take to fix it.

The nearest you could come to it would be to actually vaporize them -- stop doing these things at the federal level at all. It was never intended to be that way, that's why the federal executive branch has only one elected official. Instead you have the states do it, which a) gives you a house cleaning because they have to start over and b) gives you 50 chances to get it right instead of just one so that one bad regulatory choice can't destroy an industry nationwide.

But that's just a major problem, not the only problem. Zoning is nearly as bad, maybe even worse, but is local. Because that one isn't caused by unaccountability, it's caused by NIMBYs. For that you can't just limit the powers of the federal government, you even need to restrict the local governments from doing that.

That one would be easy to fix, on paper -- require that in any 100 square miles of land area at least 50% of the land can't prohibit anything other than noxious industrial uses, meaning you can build mixed commercial and residential with unlimited density, and in any 10,000 square miles of land area, at least half of that 50% (i.e. 25%) has to be completely unzoned, meaning you can build literally anything. Then the people who want single family homes can have the other 50% of the land area, just not the >90% it currently is in many areas. But now actually do that.

If it's one thing the US gov has down, it's how to move super slow. No way it gets done in a 10 years.

There's two parts to this:

1. US government contracting preferentially selecting over the last 75 years for people who are used to working slow and dotting every i / crossing every t -- i.e. business as usual

2. Regulations during business as usual slowing down the maximum throughput of processes

That isn't to say that other people don't still exist in the US, just that they're not currently at government contractors, because the government hasn't prioritized their core competencies (speed).

It's entirely possible that, similar as was done to military command staff at the outbreak of WWII, the US rewrites its regs, fires people who are incompetent at working at a faster pace, and recognizes and elevates talent.

Unfortunately the current executive branch, while tearing down regulations, then has more interest in profiteering and nepotism than truly pushing exceptional engineers.