Trump's Infrastructure Plan: The good and bad

Last week, the White House announced its long-awaited infrastructure plan that hopes to fix and renovate America’s deteriorating infrastructure. President Trump has been vocally criticizing the state of American roads, bridges, tunnels, and freeways since the early days of his campaign, but now the White House has specifics on how to tackle America’s infrastructure crisis.

The condition of American surface transportation services and facilities is below average. Obama, Trump, and other politicians are right- America needs to fix its infrastructure. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers’ (ASCE) 2017 Report Card, the United States’ infrastructure scores a letter grade D+. In their full quadrennial report, ASCE claims that the US simply doesn’t invest enough resources into its massive infrastructure system. 

Different geographical locations of the United States have developed unequally throughout the centuries due to various population sizes, geographical conditions, and political convictions. Therefore, we see a large disparity between the conditions of city infrastructure and rural infrastructure. Traditionally, the United States was significantly more decentralized before the Great Depression, which resulted in each state and municipality having different standards, regulations, and funding for their infrastructure. While the public transportation system, roads, and bridges in the New York City, for example, were in an excellent condition in the 1930s, remote states and locations lacked reliable transportation services almost everywhere around the country. In the 1950s, the Federal government began to provide its first financial assistance to states and municipalities around the country in form of matching grants that aimed to help states to raise highways. States had to provide 80% of funding while the Federal govt contributed 20% of the cost. Throughout the years, the Federal government has become more generous and more flexible with what kind of projects it sponsors. During the Obama Administration the Fed. Gov’t significantly increased its infrastructure spending as part of the Fix America’s Infrastructure (FAST) plan. The FAST Plan did not only offer 50-50% matching grants, it also began to provide block grants for green transportation projects.

Trump’s Infrastructure plan aims to go back to basics. The plan proposes to invest over 200 billion USD over 10 years into transportation and surface services, such as roads, bridges, sewers, freeways, and public transportation projects. Part of Trump’s infrastructure plan is also proposing only 20% Federal assistance for every transportation project, leaving the burden primarily on states or municipalities. This move, many fear, might worsen infrastructure quality in many states, especially the poor ones that can’t afford to invest that much money.

The good thing about Trump’s Infrastructure plan is that it attempts to streamline federal environmental regulations and processes that tend to slow down new development. Permit processing and environmental review on major infrastructure projects tend to take from five to ten years, and Trump promises to cut the waiting time to just two years. Although many Democrats have begun to dismiss the new infrastructure plan, some Democrats are on board with at least some parts of the plan. (Schaper, 2018) The Mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti praises the proposal for allowing cities to build faster and more efficiently, but also complains about the lack of funding.

“Any day we cut red tape is also music to the ears of America’s mayors. And so I think that’s a great part of this proposal if it actually bears out. But we do need to have money to match that.”

The White House, however, insists that the latest infrastructure plan is only supplementing existing infrastructure budgets. But some are still unhappy. A mayor of a South Carolinian town Steve Benjamin worries that most of the proposed budget comes from budget cuts to transit, public and social services.



Sources:

Schaper. 2018
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/02/12/585261492/trump-infrastructure-plan-would-pay-for-a-fraction-of-investment

Dawid. 2018
https://www.planetizen.com/news/2018/02/97231-praise-trump-infrastructure-plan

ASCE. 2017
https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/

The White House. 2018
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/building-stronger-america-president-donald-j-trumps-american-infrastructure-initiative/