Eric Risberg/AP Photo
Cyclists ride past Crissy Field toward the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, November 2014.
President Trump has talked and talked about delivering trillions for infrastructure. On the campaign trail in 2016, he derided the country’s third-world level of roads, bridges, and airports, and turned a niche issue once the exclusive province of transportation geeks, bureaucrats, and municipal and business leaders into an unexpected talking point. He vowed massive investments and tantalized voters with visions of bipartisan efforts to reverse decades of underinvestment and neglect, building projects that the world would envy. And there was even faint reason for hope: If there was one past experience Trump could draw from, it was putting his name on building projects.
But Trump succeeded in only one respect: turning the subject into a national joke with an “infrastructure week” punch line.
In this summer of the coronavirus pandemic, House Democratic leaders called Trump’s bluff with a $1.5 trillion infrastructure investment package. There’s much that’s undeniably big, bold, and transformational in the plan and, like much of what passes for legislative activity in the 116th Congress, the outcome is preordained. The bill that passed the House on Wednesday will roll like a crash test dummy into the Senate roadblock known as Mitch McConnell. Then Democrats and Republicans will head off for the Fourth of July recess pointing fingers and complaining about who is to blame.
The Moving Forward Act is an undeniably complex piece of legislative scaffolding. About $500 billion would have gone into a five-year surface transportation reauthorization to replace the FAST Act, which expires in September. The bill proposes $319 billion for highway investments, including long-sought-after monies for upgrades and maintenance of existing roads. There are dollars for extras like gridlock reduction plans, electric-vehicle charging stations, and programs to reduce pedestrian and bicycle deaths. More billions went to transit investments and highway, bus, and truck safety programs. Amtrak would see a huge boost, a tripling of its usual allocation.
House leaders did not stop with the surface transportation reauthorization. They added another $1 trillion for infrastructure improvements and projects for other sectors: water, broadband, next-generation 911 emergency response, public schools, tribal lands, and more. Rep. Peter DeFazio of Oregon, the chair of the House Transportation Committee, assured that the bill hewed closely to Green New Deal goals, with funds for programs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, incentivize renewable-energy initiatives, and climate resilience projects. All of that raised predictable Republican objections about wasteful expenditures, green extravagances, and preferences for urban mobility projects over rural needs. This is a perennial but largely unfounded complaint in a period when cars continue to dominate the transportation landscape.
What lawmakers are likely to do is extend the FAST Act for another year so that states can fund existing programs on October 1.
On the pandemic relief front, the bill would have provided funds to state departments of transportation to address revenue shortfalls due to COVID-19, such as allowing them to cover operating expenses and salaries with federal funds. That move would have advantaged state departments of transportation over other areas of state government that have also been decimated by revenue losses. After all, why should transportation be a privileged sector during a pandemic?
But McConnell has consistently said that the Senate will not advance the House bill, one he has described as “nonsense,” crafted to “show fealty to the radical left.” The more likely scenario is that after this requisite scolding of his House colleagues, McConnell may be forced to take up another coronavirus relief package before Labor Day that addresses the overall fiscal crisis faced by states and localities, rather than a bill that gives preference to one area.
The red and blue paintball wars obscure another problem: The surface transportation reauthorization must get done by September 30, the end of the current fiscal year. What lawmakers are likely to do is extend the FAST Act for another year so that states can fund existing programs on October 1 (the legislative language to do so is already contained in the Democrats’ bill).
Lawmakers will probably jettison most of the green-infrastructure proposals, measures to address the climate catastrophes to come, and various new infrastructure sector projects and shuffle off those aspirations to the next Congress.
The Democrats’ infrastructure bill never contained any new plans to pay for the country’s transportation needs, so Congress will default to bailing out the functionally insolvent Highway Trust Fund, a major source of transportation revenues. The fund’s revenue mechanism, the federal gas tax, has not been increased since 1993, so Congress will again use monies from the general fund rather than taking up alternative user-fee proposals such as vehicle miles traveled.
During Tuesday’s floor debate, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland commented that when Democratic leaders went to the White House to discuss spending trillions on infrastructure, Trump walked out. For someone who campaigned on rebuilding crumbling infrastructure, it was a fitting coda. Ultimately, Trump delivered nothing but four years of infrastructure farce.
The Moving Forward Act is a grand statement of infrastructure aims that will get lost in the cries for help emanating from states less concerned about transformation than survival. Both Congress and the White House continue to lag behind a pandemic crisis of their own making, one that partisan one-upmanship on the cusp of a holiday weekend won’t solve. Neither branch is up to the demands of transformative lawmaking, and all too happy to punt the hard work of governing into the future. Democrats have gone big on infrastructure, but once again everyone will just go home.
This article is part of our ongoing series on sustainable mobility, transportation, and climate.
