America Should Be More Like Operation Warp Speed

The U.S. government can achieve great things quickly when it has to. In November 2020, the Food and Drug Administration granted emergency-use authorization to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for COVID-19. Seven days later, a competing vaccine from Moderna was approved. The rollout to the public began a few weeks later. The desperate search for a vaccine had been orchestrated by Operation Warp Speed, an initiative announced by the Trump administration that May. Developing, testing, manufacturing, and deploying a new vaccine typically takes a decade or more. OWS, which accomplished the feat in months, belongs in the pantheon of U.S. innovation triumphs, along with the Manhattan Project and the Apollo moon-landing program. It’s a case study in how the U.S. government can solve complex, urgent problems, and it challenges the narrative that public institutions have lost their ability to dream big and move fast.

[Read: The one area where the U.S. COVID-19 strategy seems to be working]

That narrative, sadly, has ample basis in recent history. Many efforts to upgrade in 2021, “America lags its peers … in the on-time and on-budget delivery of infrastructure.” NASA’s latest mega-rocket, the Space Launch System, took its first test flight in 2022, six years behind schedule, despite the investment of an astronomical $23.8 billion since 2011. Agency officials to the Government Accountability Office that the SLS program is “unsustainable.”