EDITORIAL: Democrat has an epiphany about the regulatory state

Pete Buttigieg has experienced his George McGovern moment. Will the Democrats notice? We can only hope.

This week, the former transportation secretary under President Joe Biden appeared on MSNBC and let slip that too much government stifles efforts to quickly tackle vital infrastructure project. Mr. Buttigieg lamented “the fact that is so hard to build and do things in this country — and I lived this when I was at the Department of Transportation. We got 20,000 infrastructure projects done, but we could have done more if it were easier to complete the things that we start in this country. And we could have done it more efficiently with our dollar.”

The irony is rich, given that Mr. Buttigieg has been an ardent supporter of Washington’s sprawling administrative state. Mr. Biden’s massive spending bills were larded up with goodies for progressive interest groups — green extremists, Big Labor, social activists — that increased costs and made them more difficult to complete. Efforts to build thousands of government EV charging stations or to connect rural Americans to the internet, for instance, became bogged down in regulatory minutia grounded in concerns over ancillary issues such as “equity” and “social justice.”

It is this type of red tape that the Trump administration is properly attempting to winnow.

Mr. Buttigieg’s epiphany that a hyper-regulatory regime is a hindrance to actually accomplishing anything (see: California) brings to mind the conversion of Mr. McGovern, the Democratic standard-bearer in the 1972 presidential election. Mr. McGovern lost that race and returned to the Senate as a South Dakota Democrat. After he became a victim of the Reagan wave in 1980, he eventually bought a rustic Connecticut inn and restaurant. It became an eye-opening experience.

Mr. McGovern soon learned that local, state and federal regulations — many of which he had eagerly supported — threatened the survival of his new endeavor. In a 1992 op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, he bemoaned the litany of “challenges we faced that drive operating costs and financing charges beyond what a small business can handle.”

Mr. McGovern continued: “In retrospect, I wish I had known more about the hazards and difficulties of such a business. … I also wish that during the years I was in public office, I had had this firsthand experience about the difficulties business people face every day. That knowledge would have made me a better U.S. senator and a more understanding presidential contender.”

Those trying to eke out a living in the private sector live with such concerns every day. Even if it happens only once every three decades, we’ll count it as progress that another prominent Democrat now grasps that an aggressive regulatory apparatus imposes significant costs that too often smother entrepreneurialism, growth and progress.