With a shaved head atop a solid slab of a body, Mitch Landrieu is built like a bullet. But an amiable one, whose happy job is to efficiently dispense $1.2 trillion from a legislative cornucopia to the federal agencies, governors and mayors. Which is easier said than done.

He was lieutenant governor of a red state, Louisiana, 2004-2010, and mayor of a blue city, New Orleans, 2010-2018, and since November has been President Joe Biden’s choice to oversee implementation of the infrastructure legislation. Landrieu became mayor with much post-Katrina reconstruction remaining

Two months ago, Georgia celebrated the completion of an almost $1 billion infrastructure project, the deepening of the 38-mile Savannah River channel through which container ships, the symbols and enablers of globalization, approach the nation’s third-busiest port. It took almost seven years — after 14 years consumed surmounting environmental and other hurdles.

Time was, the nation did things quicker. Beginning in 1930, it built the Empire State Building, then the world’s tallest building, from a hole in the ground to its topping off, in 410 days. It built the Pentagon, the world’s largest low-rise office building, in 16 months — during World War II.

That was then. This is now: Nine years of permitting processes, 2003-2012, were required before the construction of a San Diego desalination plant. Philip K. Howard, a Manhattan attorney (Covington and Burling) and student of coagulated government, notes that five years and 20,000 pages of environmental and other compliance materials (there were 47 permits from 19 federal, state and local agencies) preceded the project of raising the roadway on New Jersey’s Bayonne Bridge.

“Everything,” Landrieu acknowledges, “is a slog.” In his first six months on his current job, he pushed $110 billion “out the door.” About half of the $1.2 trillion will fund what most people think of as infrastructure — roads, bridges, airports, ports. The other half will fund infrastructure capaciously defined

The word “infrastructure,” denoting shiny new things everyone can see and use, polls well, so the phrase “human infrastructure” was coined to give momentum to social programs. Landrieu, however, defends at least some of this semantic legerdemain.

Commentator Ezra Klein, arguing that America needs “a liberalism that builds,” says the nation “is notable for how much we spend and how little we get.” Klein says Japan, Canada and Germany build a kilometer of rail for $170 million, $254 million and $287 million, respectively. The United States: $538 million.

But perhaps the U.S. government is unusually susceptible to being made so because of what University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley calls “the procedure fetish.” The result is what Howard calls “rule stupor.”

All this is made in America by a homegrown chimera: The progressive aspiration to reduce government to the mechanical implementation of an ever-thickening web of regulations that leaves no room for untidy discretion and judgment.

“We are,” Landrieu says, “in a short-term world solving long-term problems.” One such problem is that Americans no longer believe what Biden says the infrastructure law will prove: That the nation “can do big things again.” Landrieu’s task is to make the law prove rather than refute this.