The shrubby landscape of Syracuse belies its rich history.

Barren and half-abandoned these days, Syracuse was once a pillar of industrial America: one of the country’s premier salt producers, then a hub for river shipping, then, a steel town. Finally, it pivoted to electrical equipment. By 1965, Syracuse was home to one of General Electric’s biggest factories.

In the last 40 years, however, “The Salt City” has fallen victim to a familiar decay. Corporate consolidation and offshoring have largely handed its jobs to Mexico and Vietnam.

So in October 2022, when the Biden administration announced that it would be pumping money into the city to “rebuild American critical manufacturing” under its flagship CHIPS and Science Act (legislation that provided $52.7 billion in federal funding for semiconductor manufacturing), residents were overjoyed. In response to the new pool of grant money, Micron, the only US company that produces computer memory (which is in everything from your phone to the chips we use to train AI), announced that they’d spend $100 billion to build a giant semiconductor factory in Syracuse.

After Micron said their project would create nearly 50,000 jobs in central New York, Republicans and Democrats came together to laud the investment. Rebuilding American manufacturing, after all, was presumably a bipartisan effort.

The first Trump administration was pivotal in setting the stage for what would become the CHIPS Act. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, then-US CTO and Under Secretary of War Michael Kratsios, and Under Secretary of State Keith Krach architected the first semiconductor deal with Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC, and designed many of the chipmaking incentives Joe Biden later adopted.

But while they were happy to continue the work in theory, the Biden administration ditched many of their suggestions behind regulatory reform. After all, they had to “root out the rot” and ensure that Trump’s inadequacy wouldn’t prevent them from creating safe and equitable job opportunities…

As a result, today, the biggest barrier to building in America is not a dearth of money. It’s the fact that for every new factory you’d like to build, you have to deal with swathes of arcane laws. There’s no greater case study of this sad series of barriers than Syracuse. Almost four years after the CHIPS Act, not a single brick has been laid for the new Syracuse chip factory. And it’s all because of a couple of literal bats.