Today the Strong America Tour takes me to the nation’s capital. This is certainly not the first time that my work with Strong Towns has brought me here. Over the years I’ve had the opportunity to meet with legislators, executive branch officials, and advocacy groups. I was even once invited to a meeting by the White House in the executive office building. I’ve enjoyed these opportunities, but also found them rather frustrating.

Those of you that have had the opportunity to read Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity know that I don’t have the kind of five-point plan that makes for good national political spin. I’m routinely invited to suggest the one or two proactive pieces of legislation that can be enacted to bring about the Strong Towns vision. Early in their administration, the Trump transition team even asked me for advice on infrastructure spending. Needless to say, my advice has never been heeded.

That’s because my advice tends to be more, “First, do no harm” than anything else. In my book, I cite Nassim Taleb’s concept of Via Negativa, the gains that can be made by first removing things that are potentially doing harm. From Taleb’s book, Antifragile:

We know a lot more what is wrong than what is right, or, phrased according to the fragile/robust classification, negative knowledge (what is wrong, what does not work) is more robust to error than positive knowledge (what is right, what works). Knowledge grows by subtraction much more than by addition — given that what we know today might turn out to be wrong but what we know to be wrong cannot turn out to be right, at least not easily.

One thing that we know for sure is wrong is the way this country spends money on transportation. Whether it’s North Carolina destroying a small town to widen a highway, Louisiana running a new highway through the middle of a neighborhood, or any number of similar crazy projects moving ahead in zombie-like fashion, there is seemingly no end to the destruction being wrought with federal transportation dollars.

And while, sure, there is the occasional sidewalk or bus route that gets a little bit of money, the tradeoff for those crumbs is literally billions in spending on some of the lowest returning, most destructive projects imaginable. We’ve long called for #NoNewRoads — a freeze on all new transportation spending until there is significant reform — and fought against those in the Infrastructure Cult who self-servingly call for for more transportation spending, even when the numbers supporting that call are ridiculous.