Yes, that’s not the issue. The US still has many of the best engineering schools in the world and projects very rarely fail in the US because engineers screwed up and couldn’t handle it.
The problem is that the government has lost the backbone to actually disrupt people’s lives in the ways necessary to do large scale projects.
The California rail is not difficult, but it is quagmired in NIMBYism and political trading. The chosen route is not about efficiency or anything engineering related, it’s about scratching the right backs.
>The best minds in the US are focused on showing marginally more ads, wall street , and lots of other things that pay very well, but not big engineering works.
Because big engineering projects don’t ever get greenlit. There has never been a case where we wanted to build mass infrastructure, got all of the approvals, and then went, “whoops, nobody can engineer this”.