With President Joe Biden expected to sign the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill into law on Monday, the nation is about to embark on a long-discussed series of major projects aimed at bringing the built environment up to date — and creating the new jobs he promised on the campaign trail.
The bill funds everything from new and repaved bridges and roads to water systems, expanded broadband access, and investments in renewable energy that could fundamentally transform the American landscape.
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But the question now is how such a massive spending bill radiates out from Capitol Hill over the 50 states and thousands of individual cities and counties that make up the country.
Any major government spending project brings with it concerns over bureaucratic red tape, extensive reviews and planning sessions, overhead costs, delays, and, in the worst cases, outright corruption.
“So much of the cost-effectiveness of this, and its ultimate reach and impact, will depend on federal, state, and local coordination,” said Joseph Kane, a fellow at the Brookings Institution. “We’re now past the political phase, at least on Capitol Hill, and we’re shifting into an implementation phase of how the funding gets out there.”
The basic question: Just how many miles, bridges, and broadband and transit upgrades will the public get for their $1.2 trillion?
While the full answer won’t be known for years or even decades, and local governments will have a strong say in what ultimately gets built, language released so far gives a clue as to the bill’s priorities.
The legislation allocates $110 billion for roads and bridges, $11 billion for transportation safety, $1 billion to reconnect communities divided by 20th-century highway construction, $39 billion for public transit, $66 billion for rail, $17 billion for ports, $25 billion for airports, and $55 billion for water, among other items.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates it will add $256 billion to the budget deficit over 10 years, a figure which could grow as programs are extended by Congress.
Those official numbers rely on a lot of budget gimmicks, argues the Heritage Foundation’s David Ditch, who calls reported cost estimates “the tip of the iceberg.”
“The cost-benefit analysis, the economic benefit from this bill will fall well short of the costs,” he predicts.
While the bill ambitiously looks toward what the White House hopes are the transportation and energy forms of the future, such as cycling and public transit, wind, and solar energy, those investments come at the expense of the systems most people use today.
Ditch said some funds will be diverted from the Highway Trust Fund in order to build bike paths and sidewalks, even though those are used far less often to travel by the average person.
Moreover, the Davis-Bacon Act means that many projects, even in right-to-work states, will be completed using union labor that adds to the overall costs of projects.
For Biden, who has promised to be the most pro-union president in modern history, that’s a win. But it may not be a win for efficiency.
“It eliminates any efficiencies and advantages that a non-union shop would have,” Ditch said. “There are ways of reforming it so it doesn’t impose an artificially high mandate on wages. But the chances of getting that sort of reform through Congress are unbelievably slim for the foreseeable future.”
The infrastructure bill does enjoy relatively high bipartisan support, and the final composition of the bill was thus more favorable to business and other Republican priorities than previous versions of the legislation. It attracted the votes of 19 GOP senators and wouldn’t have passed the House without the help of 13 Republicans.
The Bipartisan Policy Center, a D.C. think tank, applauded the bill’s passage and called it, “a reminder of our government’s potential to develop broadly supported durable public policy.”
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Kane predicts that the next few months will be extremely busy in Washington, especially for Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg and his team.
As the bill rolls out to the rest of America, one of the most important challenges will be steering clear of high-profile boondoggles, such as President Barack Obama’s Solyndra drama, that undermine the wider effort’s legitimacy.
There’s a lot on the line. Passage of the bill boosts infrastructure spending as a percentage of gross domestic product to its highest point since the 1980s. If the reconciliation bill is also passed, infrastructure spending would exceed the share from the New Deal.
While $1.2 trillion is quite a bit of cash, Kane cautions that it’s not infinite, and there will be many different local governments fighting over it. That, he hopes, means they become innovative in their approach to stretching every dollar as far as it can go.
“We’re a big country. We have 50,000 water utilities across the country,” he said. “I think this funding will help all places, but the ultimate impact won’t be fully known for years, if not decades, to come.”
