Clancy Collins retweetledi
Everywhere I go in South Carolina, I hear the same thing. Traffic is worse, roads are falling apart, and growth is outpacing infrastructure. People are frustrated, and they should be. We are one of the fastest-growing states in the country, yet our roads look like we never saw it coming.
The political ruling class has had decades to fix this. They’ve studied it, held hearings on it, campaigned on it, and promised to fix it over and over again. And what do we have to show for it? Nothing, except for some of the worst roads in America.
Their answer is always the same. Spend more money. So we spent more money. Spending over the last decade went from $ 1.3 billion annually to $ 3.1 billion annually. What happened? The percent of acceptable roads went down. Now what? More commissions and studies. The ruling class says MORE MONEY. They have asked for an additional billion. Enough already.
This is not a funding problem. It is a leadership problem.
Through DOGESC, we used AI-powered tools to analyze SCDOT’s regulations and compare them to actual law. What we found should shock every taxpayer in this state. Roughly 37% of those regulations have no basis in state or federal law. Another 60% take existing law and expand it far beyond what was ever intended. These rules were not passed by elected officials. They were created by bureaucrats who decided what the law should be.
That is how you end up with a Russian gulag system that cannot get out of its own way.
You have over 40,000 miles of roads being managed out of Columbia, which makes no sense. You have in-house maintenance crews operating like it’s 1970. You have contracts that shift risk onto taxpayers while allowing overruns and delays with little accountability. You have layers of bureaucracy, commissions, and boards where no one is clearly in charge and no one is held responsible when things fail.
When projects fall behind, who gets fired? When costs explode, who answers? When roads fall apart, who is accountable? Right now, the answer is no one.
That is the problem.
In the private sector, this would never be tolerated. You don’t keep the same leadership, the same structure, and the same broken processes and expect a different result. You fix the system. You put someone in charge. You demand accountability. And you deliver results.
That is exactly what we are going to do.
SCDOT needs to be completely rebooted. The legislature-appointed commission needs to go and be replaced with a cabinet-level Secretary of Transportation who actually understands construction and operations. State-controlled roads need to be cut in half, with local governments managing their own roads with oversight. In-house maintenance needs to end so we can reduce bureaucracy by at least 50% and bring in real accountability. Contracts need to be rewritten by people who understand risk and negotiation. AI needs to be deployed so projects come in on time and on budget as the standard, not the exception.
We are going to eliminate the layers of unnecessary regulation that are driving up costs and slowing everything down. If a regulation does not tie back to actual law, it should not exist. It is that simple.
This is not complicated. It just requires leadership and executive experience, something none of my opponents have.
Instead, what we’ve had is a political ruling class that has allowed this system to grow, to become more inefficient, and to produce worse results year after year. They talk about fixing roads every election cycle, but they never fix the system that is causing the problem. That’s why nothing changes.
It’s time for something different.
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