Ten years ago, a general pessimism began to set in among some pundits and technologists who convinced themselves that America can’t do big things anymore.

Although the U.S. had created digital services like Facebook, these thinkers noted, massive technological efforts to match the scale of the Manhattan Project to develop nuclear weapons, the Apollo moon landings, or big infrastructure projects like the Hoover Dam or the interstate highway system, seemed out of reach in the modern era.

But then, this month, that changed. Researchers at Moderna Inc. and Pfizer Inc. both announced preliminary results showing that their COVID-19 vaccines are more than 90% effective against the pandemic virus. The first shots could start going into Americans’ arms within weeks.

This is a monumental feat. Typically, developing a vaccine takes 10 to 15 years, and the fastest ever recorded previously was four years (not counting variations on existing vaccines such as flu shots). This time, multiple vaccines were created in less than a year.

This was not solely a U.S. accomplishment; Pfizer partnered with the German company BioNTech SE, and funding came from the German government. But the development was possible in part because the U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority committed up front to buying a large amount of the vaccine if it was successful. And Moderna’s success was the result of an all-American public-private partnership, with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and BARDA both pitching in large amounts of resources.

This proves the U.S. can still do big things when it wants to.

Many of the important undertakings facing the government — building a modernized energy grid, creating denser housing and public transit in the suburbs, retrofitting buildings to use electricity instead of gas, and cleaning up lead pollution — will founder if the government can’t find some way to bring down costs.

So the U.S. needs to apply the same urgency and political will to construction that it applied to vaccine development. Costly delays and interruptions need to be bypassed or forbidden, inefficient contracting processes must be reformed, and state politicians have to override local ones. Instead of treating construction as a luxury, a jobs program or an opportunity for pork-barrel spending, the government has to make it a priority.

America still does big things in the scientific realm, but to meet the challenges of the 21st century, it has to be better at building things in the physical world.

Noah Smith is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist.