As “abundance” becomes the 2025 rallying cry for those who want to build more, faster, it’s worth asking: What kind of systems actually let us do that, not just once, but at scale, and for the long haul?

Because right now, we’re not building systems. We’re building vibes. The abundance agenda is gaining momentum, but it’s still largely an aesthetic: speed, urgency, scale. What’s missing is a grounded theory of function.

The need to build critical infrastructure like housing and renewable energy is real, but to make lasting progress, we need to understand why we’re stuck. That means taking a hard look at how public process actually works, why it calcifies, and what it might take to rebuild something stronger.

Process Culture Is a Symptom of Failed Stewardship

The system didn’t get slow and bloated because it got sued. It got sued because it stopped working.

When the government doesn’t deliver, public need doesn’t disappear—it increases and builds pressure. Safe housing, clean air, health care, and livable wages are basic needs for a healthy society. When the systems designed to secure those needs fail or stall, that pressure finds a new route for release, and in the US, it’s usually through the courts.

Legal scholar Nicholas Bagley coined the term “procedure fetish” to describe this regulatory overgrowth, but the metastasized process isn’t obstructionism or just the nanny state. It’s scar tissue.

Steps are created. Harm continues. More steps are created, layered over the last like skin healing over a wound. Repeat that for 75 years, and you get a system that’s more scar than skin.

But our regulatory bacchanal isn’t about kink. It’s about people demanding proof. Show your work, show your logic. Prove you won’t screw it up again. That’s a rational response to being ignored or harmed, again and again.

Layers of process are what remain when stewardship fails and protection becomes the burden of the public.

In Abundance, Ezra Klein critiques the requirement for air filters in certain affordable housing as regulatory overreach. But the deeper absurdity lies in continuing to build affordable housing in places where air filters are necessary in the first place.

That’s a front-end policy failure rerouted through regulation.

Malfunctioning as Designed

Given this vicious cycle, it’s clear we need to reframe our understanding of governance. So, instead of a series of irrational or unpredictable actions, think of it as a complex system with inputs, outputs, constraints, feedback loops, and pressure points.

Healthy governance absorbs and dissipates public need over a distributed network. Unhealthy governance contains and represses public need, accumulating pressure instead of releasing it. So we end up with court battles, procedural gridlock, and optics over outcomes.

Those aren’t malfunctions—they’re the predictable result of a system trying to regulate after failure. A system over-correcting for balance that wasn’t established on the front end.

Less Blueprints, More Feedback Loops

Right now, the abundance agenda’s main action item is to streamline approvals, most notably through NEPA exemptions.

But trying to streamline without addressing root dysfunction is like claiming to fix a clogged pipe by jamming a smaller, unclogged pipe inside it. It might feel productive, but it ultimately exacerbates the problem.

We need to stop designing for presumed outcomes and start designing for adaptation. The systems we rely on—permits, approvals, outreach—are failing because they were built as static blueprints instead of evolving feedback loops.

What would it look like to create a bureaucracy that can integrate new data, shift when outcomes aren’t working, and respond when public need changes? Durable systems aren’t rigid; they’re responsive.

For example, rather than carving out NEPA exemptions, start with what we actually need: projects that don’t harm communities or ecosystems. Then build backward. What resources, structures, and capacity are required to achieve that outcome up front, instead of once plans are made and design is finished? What processes would actually reduce harm, rather than just document it?

And while this may sound utopian, we’ve seen glimpses of how this can work. When the Port Authority of NY and NJ began redesigning the Midtown Bus Terminal, it invested early in meaningful, iterative community collaboration. Based on that input, the agency revised construction schedules and ramp designs to reduce neighborhood disruption.

The goal isn’t perfect consensus or endless theoretical debate. It’s building systems that are inherently responsive—bureaucracies designed for change, not control. And that means embracing iteration and feedback, and letting processes evolve based on real-world experience instead of clinging to a rigid, idealized blueprint.

Trust Is Critical Infrastructure

Engagement on the Midtown Bus Terminal wasn’t just a checkbox exercise and the community knew it. That upfront trust-building helped preempt the kind of backlash that can derail projects, and laid groundwork for more productive engagement on future projects.

Trust, when earned through real process, isn’t a PR fix; it’s a structural solution. The Port Authority example was effective not just because of the result, but because of the process.

Legitimacy can’t be fostered through engagement sessions that just rubber-stamp foregone conclusions and it will not gain a toehold when vocal minorities are allowed to stymie necessary progress. Trust only takes root in systems that can meaningfully integrate dissent and adjust to complexity.

The New Architecture of Abundance

Abundance is a compelling rallying cry, but right now it’s mostly vibes: more, better, faster. The agenda’s deeper challenge—and best opportunity—lies in shaping the actual policy architecture that will make any of it possible.

Because an abundance that lasts depends less on speed and more on the durability of what we build. If we want to move fast without breaking things, we need systems built to handle pressure, evolve, and meaningfully channel conflict. And that starts by aligning speed with legitimacy: agree on shared goals, fund the implementers, and create accountability mechanisms that work.

A healthy democracy metabolizes and redistributes tension. Friction and dissent are inevitable and essential, and in my experience, diverse inputs produce stronger results. So let’s embrace the milieu and make it productive.

If the abundance agenda wants to create meaningful change, it needs to go deeper. Speed is good because the urgency is warranted right now, but capacity—real, public-serving, legitimacy-earning capacity—is the only thing that makes speed sustainable.

We keep trying to shortcut repair by making things faster when what we need is to make them functional. And that starts with telling the truth about what broke, why, and what kind of system might actually hold together next time.