Every 4 years there is a new administration in the White House. How can meaningful progress be made with such frequent changes in staff? Same goes for state level administration.
In: Economics
The big answer to this is that the people who actually do the work of implementing the policy decisions **aren’t** changing. On top of that, it is generally very hard to simply erase everything your predecessor started. If a particular motion is voted into law by the senate, then even if the next session the senate changes, they would still need to pass another vote reverting that law, which takes time.
I’ll try to frame this as neutrally as possible while still giving you a relevant example: let’s imagine that during his tenure Trump had gotten the appropriate legislation passed to start building the border wall with mexico in a big way. That would be hundreds or thousands of jobs for people doing the construction, surveying, logistics, and millions or billions of dollars in supplies and equipment, etc etc. Now, Biden is elected, and he doesn’t like the wall. Well, he has a lot of other things on his plate too, and the border wall might be pretty far down the list of things to address. The laws and funding bills passed to start the project don’t just evaporate once a new president is elected. So, cancelling the project entirely would probably be pretty close to impossible (at least on a short time frame), the closest that the new administration would be likely to get would be to drastically cut the funding, slowing things down. But, that means that when the person in charge changes again, the system is probably still in place, and the new president can allocate more funding towards the project once again.
For better or worse, lots of things in a democratic government move **very slowly**, which can be a disadvantage at times, but also means that the whims of a handful of people are less likely to be able to influence things one way or the other. It often takes a lot of pushing to get the ball rolling, but by that same token it takes a lot of pushing to *stop* the ball rolling as well.
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