Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy propose to use the new Department of Government Efficiency to help Americans get more bang for their government buck. They’re absolutely right that often too many procedures — however well-intentioned — make it hard for government officials to do a good job.

But they’re dead wrong that taking a meat axe to the federal government’s workforce will make things better; in fact, that’s more likely to make things worse.

Take the area that I know best, and one deeply in need of reform: building infrastructure. The new administration needs to rethink how we go about fixing our country’s roads, bridges and subway lines. For reasons I lay out in a new paper, doing so has become too expensive and takes way too much time.

For example, building urban transit costs three times as much per mile in the U.S. as the average rich country. And, as Leah Brooks and I discovered, the cost to build a mile of Interstate highway tripled between the 1960s and 1980s — and kept going up after that.

These problems are all the more important because we are in the midst of a historic investment in America’s infrastructure, with over $1.6 trillion in investments in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act — much of which is happening in red states (which makes it unlikely to go away in the next........

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