The Infrastructure the President Can Order

On Wednesday, President Trump signed a National Security Presidential Memorandum ordering the Navy to replace electromagnetic catapults on future Ford-class carriers with steam systems. The USS Doris Miller is already halfway complete. The Navy has spent two decades developing EMALS — it launches more aircraft per day with fewer sailors and less stress on airframes than steam ever could. Trump's objection was not technical.

You're going to goddamned steam. — Donald Trump

The order is the clearest expression yet of a pattern that has been accumulating across the administration's infrastructure decisions. It is not simply a preference for the old over the new, or the physical over the digital. What links the steam catapult to the bulldozers in Big Bend, the $83 billion green-to-fossil loan redirect, the revival of a World War II landing ship, and the $4 billion in offshore wind lease buyouts is a consistent feature: each replacement displaces a system embedded in expert review or regulatory process the executive cannot easily shortcut, and substitutes something orderable by memorandum or advanceable through waivers. The waivers the reader already knows. DHS Secretary Mullin issued them to bypass the Endangered Species Act and National Historic Preservation Act for more than 100 miles of border construction in Big Bend, where bulldozers are now cutting patrol roads through a national park ^[1][2]. The FAA proposed waiving 13 federal environmental laws to speed commercial space licensing ^[3]. The EPA shortened Clean Air Act review periods for Title V permits ^[4]. In each case, environmental review and historic-preservation law are framed as obstacles, and the waiver is the tool that clears them. The steam catapult order takes the logic further. There is no environmental law to waive — only the Navy's own engineering judgment, which the president overruled by memorandum. The Navy has warned that reverting to steam will add cost, delay delivery, and require roughly 20,000 additional sailors the service does not have ^[5]. The same pattern appears in the Navy's revival of the Medium Landing Ship, a World War II-era design procured through what Navy Secretary Phelan calls "a leaner acquisition process" — commercial-style practices that bypass the lengthy development cycle of modern naval vessels ^[6].

Enhancing our maritime dominance depends on a modernized fleet and a strong industrial base, and today’s contract helps with both — it reduces schedule risk and enables our shipbuilders to rapidly transition to ship construction. — John C. Phelan

The shared vocabulary across these decisions is a phrase that surfaces again and again: "common sense." Trump has used it to frame his authority against expert judgment.

I'm addressing it the best I can as a nondoctor, but I'm a man of common sense. — Donald Trump

Energy advisor Greg Beard deployed the same phrase to justify the $83 billion restructuring of DOE loans from wind and solar toward gas, nuclear, and coal.

I wouldn’t describe our plan as an agenda, I would describe it as common sense. — Greg Beard

The phrase does specific work: it contrasts the tangible and the simple against the complex and the expert-governed, and it casts the choice not as ideological but as obvious. Where the regulatory process cannot be bypassed, the infrastructure is not replaced — it is bought out and the capital redirected. The administration has now paid more than $4 billion to cancel offshore wind leases, with RWE's $1.22 billion payout flowing directly into a Woodside LNG facility in Louisiana ^[7][8]. The Department of Energy canceled the Biden-era National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors, removing the tool that would have let federal regulators override state denials for power line permits, with Secretary Wright framing transmission policy as serving a "climate-alarmist agenda" ^[9]. The capital moves from wind to gas, from transmission corridors to LNG terminals. But the pattern is not universal, and the exceptions reveal as much as the rule. The administration has fully embraced the $175 billion Golden Dome missile shield — a cutting-edge, space-based system of lasers, radar arrays, and interceptors — and exempted it from standard procurement rules ^[10]. Trump designated more than 1,500 data centers as critical national security infrastructure, promoting the $15 billion Stargate AI campus in Wisconsin ^[11]. The Navy is simultaneously modernizing its submarine fleet, reclassifying 19 Virginia-class boats as guided-missile vessels with hypersonic missile capability ^[12]. What distinguishes Golden Dome and AI data centers from steam catapults and border walls is not that one set is digital and the other physical. It is that the advanced systems the administration embraces can be commanded through defense programming authority or promoted through deregulation, without navigating the civilian environmental review, historic-preservation law, and engineering consensus that encumber the systems being displaced. A missile shield is ordered through the Pentagon. A data center is designated, not built, by the government. An offshore wind farm, by contrast, requires lease auctions, environmental impact statements, and transmission corridors that cross state lines — processes the executive cannot unilaterally command. The steam catapult order is not a quirk. It is the clearest statement yet of what this administration builds and what it dismantles, and what distinguishes one from the other is not ideology or nostalgia. It is whether the thing can be ordered by memorandum. The president stated the principle himself, in a different context.

I have the right to do anything I want to do. — Donald Trump

The infrastructure policy is that claim, made physical.