There is a reason every serious project today drowns in process before a single shovel hits the ground. That reason is the abuse committed by our forebears. In the early industrial age, industrialists did exactly what humans have always done when given power and opportunity: they maximized returns at the expense of everything else—people, land, water, air. We like to blame them for it, but can we really pretend surprise? Exploiting every nook and cranny to one’s advantage is not a cultural aberration. It is a basic human instinct.
Abuse it was, nonetheless. And out of that abuse, regulation was born. Initially, that was a good thing. Necessary. A corrective. A boundary drawn where none had existed before. But like every good thing humans create, regulation did not remain content with its original mission. It grew. It accreted. It metastasized. Today, the distance between its original purpose and its current form is so vast that you would struggle to detect the founding intent with a magnifying glass.
Another human instinct is at work here: accretion. Layer upon layer. Rule upon rule. Exception upon exception. Over time, flexibility petrifies, and what once regulated abuse becomes a self-sustaining organism. Left unchecked, such growth does what all uncontrolled growth eventually does—it kills the host.
Culling that overgrowth is brutally hard. Too many entrenched interests depend on it. Too many jobs. Too many careers. Too many stakeholders whose entire existence is bound up in “the process.” Regulation is no longer a tool; it is an ecosystem. And ecosystems fight for survival.
We like to tell ourselves comforting stories about intelligent reform. About trimming here, repairing there. About cutting what is obviously useless while preserving what works. In theory, this sounds reasonable. In practice, it almost never works. The system absorbs reform attempts, neutralizes them, and continues exactly as before—just thicker, slower, and more expensive.
The only strategy that has ever worked is wholesale culling. Entire swathes of regulation cut away, brutally and unapologetically, to allow something new to emerge later. This is not a pretty process. It generates ferocious resistance, institutional panic, and moral outrage. And it requires a personality capable of enduring sustained, gargantuan adversity without flinching.
In that respect—like it or not—Trump stands almost alone. https://worldoil.com/news/2026/1/28/api-urges-permitting-reform-to-support-u-s-energy-infrastructure-growth/?oly_enc_id=0139F9727701B5U