Pivoting to ‘Fix It First’ on Infrastructure

Dealing with maintenance backlogs may be the best way to sell an infrastructure package to Congress and the American people.

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There is little disagreement that American infrastructure is in the worst shape in living memory, earning a C- on the American Society of Civil Engineers’ 2021 Infrastructure Report Card. That grade was actually a marginal improvement over the D+ ASCE posted in 2017. Yet it took 20 years just to get to “somewhat average” territory.

Eleven out of the 17 categories ASCE studied earned Ds. Aviation, hazardous waste storage, and schools got a D+; levees, dams, and stormwater, a D; public transit, D-, the lowest grade; and so on. In four years, the maintenance backlog funding gap grew from $2.1 trillion over ten years to $2.5 trillion. Ignoring major industrial maintenance work produces catastrophic consequences, as anyone in New Orleans (Katrina), Minneapolis (the I-35W bridge collapse), and now Jackson, Mississippi (no running water for weeks), can testify.

The Biden administration is in the midst of calibrating its next legislative moves as it tries to pick up after four years of lost opportunities on infrastructure. For all his bloviating about refurbishing third-world-like airports and rivaling Dwight Eisenhower, and for all the endless “infrastructure weeks,” all Donald Trump actually accomplished on infrastructure was to star in a made-for-TV series of pathetic squabbles with congressional leaders over rebuilding a leaky rail tunnel between New York and New Jersey.

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Joe Biden has pivoted to a handyman approach to infrastructure with a new sales pitch: Fix It First. Monies for prioritizing new bridges, smooth roads, sturdy dams, and the jobs that come with these projects, along with a push for environmental equity, are easy to sell to just about everyone who isn’t a Republican member of Congress. The question will be whether Biden can make any progress selling that to those difficult Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Alliteration is a great asset in political messaging, but Fix It First, like Build Back Better, is a meaningless slogan unless it can be harnessed in the service of dragging recalcitrant Republicans to the negotiating table. Once derided as a defeatist posture assumed by conservatives who lacked the imagination and the wherewithal for proposing any state-of-the-art projects, Fix It First has gained currency among progressives. The U.S. should indeed be able to fill potholes, repair bridges, and build high-speed rail or universal broadband at the same time. But there is a realization that the country lacks the political wherewithal to get it all done.

The pandemic interregnum has forced Congress to come to grips with the fact that the country is seriously, really, literally falling apart. What and how much actually gets done will rest on Biden’s faith in the elusive concept of bipartisanship, or whether Democrats have to play hardball if they want to get anything done.

The Fix It First point man, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, is the closest the administration has to star power and debating skill among its Cabinet secretaries. That sends an important signal. Buttigieg has demonstrated the ability to sell the administration’s policies, if only in the blandest and most noncontroversial terms. “‘Fix it first,’ I think, is going to be a very important mantra for us,” he said earlier this month. Whether Buttigieg’s stance as the infrastructure team captain also means that transportation priorities will predominate in an infrastructure package remains to be seen. But given the dozens of competing priorities in water systems, energy, and other sectors, the administration would be hard-pressed to justify a sector-exclusive approach.

The specifics of a possible $2 trillion Biden plan have not yet been announced. However, the president said Wednesday that he would fund infrastructure through new taxes on the highest-income earners, increase the corporate tax rate, and roll back some 2017 Trump tax cuts. Nothing new there. Other revenue-raisers, like increasing a gas tax that hasn’t gone up since 1993, or adding highway user fees, have been dead letters for years.

With the exception of 500,000 electric-vehicle charging stations (an important step in electrifying the vehicle fleet, to be sure), the absence of any hints of Big Projects to date is likely by design. Biden learned quite a bit from the withering abuse heaped on Barack Obama for the high-speed rail components of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The last thing Biden wants is the spectacle of governors returning billions to the Treasury, as Sen. Rick Scott did when he rejected high-speed-rail money as governor of Florida, because he did not want to commit multiple philosophical heresies by accepting federal dollars. Republican governors would be hard-pressed to explain why they would reject Fix It First money.

Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) has catalogued Democratic priorities in his aspirational Moving Forward Act, an expansive list of diverse surface transportation goals, climate change resilience strategies, rail security and Amtrak improvements, air traffic control modernization, water system investments, broadband, school facilities, tribal-lands projects, low-income housing tax credits, and the like. Unsurprisingly, it was DOA in the Senate long before it passed the House last summer. Republicans willfully ignore that the DeFazio bill only begins to tackle the issues that the ASCE has highlighted. The price tag, $1.5 trillion over ten years, is a full trillion short of what the civil engineers warn is actually required.

The coming infrastructure fight will demonstrate how much Biden is wedded to illusions of bipartisanship or whether he wants to get his signature on important legislation.

The Senate bill, America’s Transportation Infrastructure Act, sponsored by Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY), is primarily a highway-and-bridge package that contains a few modest climate provisions, adding up to nearly $300 billion over five years. It attracted Democratic support but doesn’t address desperate needs in other sectors.

House Democrats’ decision to restore earmarks, which are specific projects in members’ districts where some of the funding can be directed, may portend a gradual meeting of the minds on infrastructure, and lawmaking more generally. The House Republican Conference voted Wednesday to go along with earmarking. The Freedom Caucus predictably voted against the move, leaving the ranking member of the Rules Committee, Tom Cole (R-OK), to inform them that they were free to avoid the practice. House Appropriations Committee Chair Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) added reforms to the restoration of earmarks (aka Community Project Funding) to improve transparency, keep private firms from securing public project funds, and require evidence of community support, which made the switch more palatable.

The coming infrastructure fight will demonstrate how much Biden is wedded to illusions of bipartisanship or whether he wants to get his signature on important legislation. Will Biden want to embolden right-wing zealots like Rick Scott, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and other potential presidential aspirants who would like nothing more than to throw up roadblocks to an infrastructure bill? After a year of acrimony and failed insurrections, the country would be better served by nuking the filibuster once and for all.

But at the end of the day, the president’s recent support of the “talking filibuster” could be a diversionary tactic. In an interview discussing the tax cuts to support infrastructure, Biden said, “I may not get [Republicans], but I’ll get the Democratic votes.” Because in 2021, those votes may be the only ones a Democratic president needs.

This article is part of our ongoing series on sustainable mobility, transportation, and climate.

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