Most Americans’ eyes glaze over at the mention of “infrastructure.” But it’s a rare American who spends any time outside his or her own dwelling who doesn’t regularly encounter elements of the nation’s crumbling infrastructure.
Fixing this was a repeated theme in Pr*sident Trump’s 2016 campaign. He pledged to create a $1 trillion infrastructure plan, with some $200 billion in federal funding used to leverage the rest of the money from the private sector. Rebuilding the U.S. infrastructure will be one of the elements addressed in tonight’s State of the Union address, but the total figure has been boosted to $1.5 trillion.
Included in that proposal are big moves regarding environmental regulations. White House economic adviser Gary Cohn told CNBC about this morning:
In an interview on "Squawk Box," Cohn called infrastructure "the next leg of the stool in our economic agenda."
"He's going to talk about a trillion and a half dollars of investment, but more importantly, he's going to talk about streamlining the approval process on infrastructure," Cohn said. "Right now, we have an infrastructure approval process that takes seven to 10 years to build relatively simple roads. We need to streamline that to less than two years."
Last March, the American Society of Civil Engineers released another of its comprehensive infrastructure report cards, “Failure to Act: Closing the Infrastructure Investment Gap for America’s Economic Future.”
As in the past, they awarded a grade of “D” to the U.S. infrastructure. And they calculated that over the decade ending in 2025, the economy will lose $4 trillion in gross domestic product because of infrastructure deficiencies. Closing the infrastructure investment funding gap for that period, they said, would take $1.44 trillion.
Last week Axios obtained and published the White House’s draft plan. The dollar figure Trump will be trumpeting tonight looks familiar in light of the ASCE’s calculation.
Streamlining. Such a positive sounding word.
As quoted by Juliet Eilperin and Michael Laris last week, Keith Benes, an environmental consultant who played a key role at the State Department in overseeing TransCanada's permit application for the Keystone XL pipeline says: "It's not, 'Let's streamline it or make it more effective. It's just, 'Let's get rid of that.' "
Critics of the administration said the proposal outlined in the document would gut key environmental protections in laws dating to the 1970s, such as the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act.
"The administration's legislative outline for infrastructure sacrifices clean air, water, the expertise of career agency staff and bedrock environmental laws," Theresa Pierno, president and CEO of the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Association, said in an email. "In short, the proposal reveals that this administration is not serious about restoring America's infrastructure."
Trump has argued that voluminous environmental studies should be pared down to "a few simple pages," and he has made broad declarations about how easy and productive the world would be without complex regulations.
While environmental regulations may appear overly complex, this is not because Washington bureaucrats make them so and thus stifle the economy, as Trump and other advocates of the Republican agenda have for years claimed. The environmental issues involved are often highly technical and a “few simple pages” are wholly inadequate to provide the guidance required. That complexity is a product of industries, their engineers and lawyers as well, and environmental advocates wanting every circumstance clearly laid out so there is no question about what’s allowed and what is prohibited.