A big, beautiful infrastructure plan was one of those “day one” things that Donald Trump promised during the campaign. But a plan requires planning, and Trump didn’t actually do any of that as part of his brand-building by running for president scheme. Then back in June, Donald Trump declared an “Infrastructure Week,” but since that week coincided with the testimony of James Comey before the Senate, a barrage of Twitter attacks by Trump that covered everyone from Comey to the Mayor of London, egging on a mini-war against Qatar based on a conspiracy theory, and the veering into another assault on the Affordable Healthcare Act … not a lot of infrastructure got done. In fact, what Trump accomplished that week was one for-the-cameras meeting and the re-introduction of a recycled, and previously rejected, plan to sell off America’s air traffic control.
For those keeping score, the attempt to sell off the air traffic control system, which never went one step beyond Trump’s announcement, came before Trump attempted to take credit for the safety of US flights over the previous year.
Now Trump has returned for Infrastructure Week, Part 2, which will of course start with another for-the-cameras meeting, and a fresh attempt to see if Trump can stay on script for more than ten minutes. But while this is a new week, Trump’s plan seems to be the same—sell off the country wholesale. Trump’s idea of a “public-private partnership” involves putting a lot of roads, bridges, parks, and other resources on the scale …
The plan calls for investing $200 billion in federal money over the coming decade to entice other levels of government and the private sector to raise their spending on infrastructure by more than $1 trillion to hit the administration’s goal of $1.5 trillion in new funding over 10 years. It also seeks to dramatically reduce the time required to obtain environmental permits for such projects.
So Trump is offering less than one-fifth of the cost of repairing and upgrading infrastructure. What does that make the people who pay the rest? Owners.
The infrastructure plan as a whole seems to be a scaled up version of Trump’s plan for air traffic control—a plan that Republicans quietly dropped from their FAA funding bill just two weeks after Trump’s first Infrastructure Week. It would either force states to pony-up the great majority of funds for caring for federal structures, or hand them off to private companies.
Trump’s plan does have one reasonable suggestion—that the nation raise the lagging gas tax, which hasn’t been updated in 25 years—but rural state legislators, which represent a great deal of Trump’s base, are unlikely to be supportive of that idea.
But Trump has another idea where the government might obtain funds.
For now, the White House is suggesting that lawmakers cut money from elsewhere in the budget, including some existing infrastructure programs.
If that seems to make no sense, it’s because it makes no sense. And even that suggestion is just to cover the less than 20 percent that Trump is proposing the federal government put forward, not the heaping burden he’d like to distribute to … somewhere else.
A properly structured infrastructure plan really could become a strong, bipartisan program—one that generated both immediate jobs and long-term public good while benefiting businesses and offering profits to contractors and suppliers alike. But since Republicans already gave away the bank in their tax “reform” bill, the funds to do more than talk about infrastructure seem to be gone.
Tune in next June, for Infrastructure Week, take three.