Completely lost in yesterday’s journalistic typhoon of virtue signaling after President Trump’s highly impolitic, but, as Powerline pointed out, basically accurate statement about the tragedy in Charlottesville, was his statement on infrastructure. It is well worth looking at.

One of the main reasons American bridges, roads, tunnels and other government-owned infrastructure are so often in poor shape is the crazy-quilt federal permitting process that has grown up over the last fifty years and desperately needs to be regularized.

It takes, on average, seven years for a complex highway project to get all the needed federal permits. A single agency can take up to five years to make up its mind. Environmental impact statements run to thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of pages, and the delays cost the American economy trillions in lost GDP. As so often happens in government, the permitting process, which was meant to assure that projects are safe, economically rational, and environmentally sound has been transformed into a means of maximizing bureaucratic paper-shuffling.

In his executive order, Trump requires a single federal agency to be the lead agency for each project and it will ride herd on all the others involved. A single “record of decision” would be signed by all the relevant agencies and permits will be issued 90 days later. The Council on Environmental Quality will mediate environmental disputes between different agencies. The goal is to reduce the time needed for the process from seven to two years.

More reforms will be needed. Environmental groups, such as The Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council, instinctively oppose any project that would expand the American economy, even ones that would have a net positive impact on the environment. They fought the Keystone XL pipeline tooth and nail, even though it will greatly reduce the threat of oil spills by moving oil transport from railroads to the pipeline.

And these groups have become highly expert at gaming the legal system to tie up projects, sometimes for decades, in court.

But Trump’s executive order yesterday was a good step in the right direction. It would have received more attention if the president could just learn not to step on his own story.