There’s a consensus among U.S. policymakers and public officials—an increasingly rare sight—that America is being suffocated by red tape.

“Abundance” advocates want to cut through zoning and permitting laws to build housing and infrastructure more quickly. Researchers such as Stanford professor Daniel Ho are using artificial intelligence to identify obsolete rules in the more than 3 billion words of legal code in the United States. And President Donald Trump, of course, brought in Elon Musk to wield the DOGE chainsaw.

But why does America have so much red tape? Society might work better if people understood what was expected of them and had room to use their judgment. The U.S. Constitution has 7,591 words. The difference between the modern red-tape state and the Constitution is operational philosophy.

Essays & ReportsAndrew ParkSeptember 16, 2026Washington Post

George Will: America’s Can-Do Spirit Needs Liberation from Can’t-Do Regulation

Philip K. Howard, a graduate of Taft prep school, Yale and the University of Virginia School of Law, says he never wore “white bucks.” This 1950s campus fashion waned before he matriculated. Those buckskin shoes were popular among young blades destined to become “white-shoe lawyers” at prestigious “white-shoe law firms,” such as Covington & Burling, where Howard, 76, is senior counsel.

He also is a genteel inveigher against the coagulation of American society, which is saturated with law. In his new book “Saving Can-Do: How to Revive the Spirit of America,” he argues that law’s proper role is preventing transgressions by authorities, not micromanaging choices so minutely that red tape extinguishes individual responsibility and the social trust that individualism engenders.

Essays & ReportsAndrew ParkOctober 1, 2025George Will, Washington Post

George Will: How Public Employee Unions Damage Schools, Policing and Government Itself

Two public schools in Manhattan illustrate the high stakes of a political choice that the nation, and many states and municipalities, must reconsider. In 2019, Success Academy Harlem 2 charter school ranked 37th among New York state’s 2,413 public elementary schools, one of which, PS 30, had only about a third as many pupils as Harlem 2, spent twice as much per pupil and ranked 1,694th. PS 30 and Harlem 2 operate in the same building.

Paralyzed Government

Governing is not a process of perfection. Like other human activities, governing involves tradeoffs and trial and error. One of the most important tradeoffs involves timing. Delay in governing often means failure. Nowhere is this more true than with environmental reviews for infrastructure. Every year of delay for new power lines, modernized ports, congestion pricing for city traffic, and road bottlenecks means more pollution and inefficiency.

NewslettersAndrew ParkJune 23, 2022Washington Post, George Will