What Democrats Have in Common with Robert Moses

T ransportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg caused a stir on Monday when, in response to a question about how newly approved infrastructure funds would be used to “deconstruct the racism that was built into the roadways,” he noted an anecdote about bridges in New York having been built too low for public buses in an effort to keep black and Puerto Rican kids away from beaches. Given Buttigieg’s McKinsey consultant background, I joked that he probably read Robert Caro’s The Power Broker to prepare for his cabinet gig.

For those unfamiliar, the book is a nearly 1,200-page biography of Robert Moses, an urban planner who dominated New York from the 1920s through 1960s, building many parks, roads, and bridges. In addition to Buttigieg, I suspect the tome has many readers in NYC-D.C. media circles. I read it myself as a requirement at Columbia University’s journalism school two decades ago. And I confess, it was such an absorbing read that for about six months after finishing it, I managed to fit an anecdote about Robert Moses into just about every conversation. To this day, anybody unfortunate enough to be stuck in a car with me on the Triborough Bridge risks a long rant on how Moses used the toll money to consolidate power for decades. Aspects of Caro’s book have been challenged over time (more on the bus anecdote, for instance, here). But I wanted to focus on another aspect of Moses’s legacy as related by Caro that offers some insight into what Democrats are trying to do right now with regard to their multi-trillion-dollar social-spending bill.

Early in the book, Caro writes that as parks commissioner in Long Island in the 1920s, Moses learned to spend lots of money to get public-works projects started, only to then demand more to complete them. “One million dollars was the amount available to Long Island out of the $15,000,000 [state park budget],” Caro writes. “[Moses] had told the Legislature that one million would be the cost of the Long Island program. He knew that actually the million would pay for only a fraction — a small fraction — of the program. But he had learned to get things done. With the million, he drove a lot of stakes.” Caro goes on to recount that instead of using the money to complete a few parks, he used it to get started on many of them.

Moses was determined to make the bathhouses at Jones Beach more elegant than the typical wood ones and, instead of having a standard ugly metal water tower, he insisted it be built to resemble a campanile in Venice — and he wanted everything built with expensive brick and sandstone, Caro recounts. So, these few structures would end up costing more than the amount initially allocated to the entire Long Island park system. After fierce lobbying, state officials agreed to give him $150,000 for all the structures. But he used the money to build only the foundation for one of them. Officials were furious when they visited the construction site to see what looked like a giant pile of sand. Caro writes:

But Moses had applied his lessons well. When his antagonists began to think about the situation, they realized they were trapped. What, exactly, for all their power, could they do? Charge that he had misled them — thereby admitting that they hadn’t investigated the project thoroughly enough in advance? Deny him further funds — thereby insuring that the $150,000 already spent would be utterly wasted?

Democrats are attempting a version of this now. As I’ve written, forced to reduce the cost on paper of their current social-spending bills, Democrats have made the decision to pass expensive policies (such as expanding Obamacare and creating a government pre-K and child-care program) by giving them expiration dates that reduce the perceived cost of their legislation in the hopes that they will develop enough of a constituency to be made permanent. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that the latest iteration of the bill would cost $2.4 trillion, but that the cost could more than double — to about $5 trillion — if all the policies were made permanent.

The Obamacare experience provides another illustrative lesson. During that debate, Democrats were forced to make certain compromises to secure Senate passage. They had to ditch the idea of including a government-run option on the law’s exchanges and to limit the subsidies to purchase insurance. At the time, Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, had to reassure liberals by arguing that “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” Citing Franklin D. Roosevelt on the signing of Social Security, he said Obamacare represented “a cornerstone in a structure which is being built but is no means complete.”

In practice, the problem Obamacare created was that its raft of new regulations drove up the price of insurance, putting coverage out of reach for those who didn’t have employer insurance or who earned just too much to qualify for subsidies. When they retook power this year, Democrats’ answer was simply to make the subsidies more generous. They included one temporary expansion of Obamacare’s subsidies as part of the $1.9 trillion spending bill passed in March that was dubbed “COVID-relief,” and the current Build Back Better legislation would extend them through 2025.

With their current reconciliation bill, Democrats are hoping to drive a lot of stakes.