Joy Asico/AP Images
Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao speaks at an Infrastructure Week kickoff event, in Washington, D.C., May 2018.
One of the most unheralded deceptions that Donald Trump pulled off on American voters was his faux passion to rebuild the country’s infrastructure. Hillary Clinton had a plan for that, but she was no match for the real-estate developer’s bluster and bombast on roads, bridges, highways and “third-world” airports. Trump, who liked to proclaim that he alone could fix just about anything, promised to move America into a new golden age of infrastructure investment.
In Tuesday’s Democratic debate, the infrastructure crisis barely got passing mentions. The candidates who did talk about infrastructure and the economy failed to note the president’s lack of follow-through on this campaign promise. Overall, viewers were treated to a three-hour crabs-in-a-barrel intraparty offensive whose main target was Elizabeth Warren.
The Democrats need to jettison these tactics and tackle Trump failings like the infrastructure crisis head-on. But for the most part, candidates can’t answer questions that the moderators don’t ask. Neither CNN nor The New York Times saw fit to include an infrastructure question in the debate. The absence of a query on the climate crisis in the wake of the September climate strikes and Greta Thunberg’s prominence was another inexplicable oversight. A throwaway question about unusual friendships in this high-stakes venue insulted viewers’ intelligence.
Several candidates gamely tried to weave the issue into other remarks. Bernie Sanders lauded rebuilding infrastructure as a job creation tool to get 15 million people back to work; Julián Castro essentially agreed. Beto O’Rourke noted that Ohio is investing in infrastructure around General Motors plants. That was the extent of the infrastructure conversation.
In 2016, Trump talked about infrastructure at every opportunity, but in three years of governing by fits of pique, this crisis has been largely unaddressed. Building consensus on infrastructure should have been easy for Trump; even Chuck Schumer hinted after the election that infrastructure could be an area of mutual agreement. This could have split the Democratic coalition and given Trump a big political win.
But lawmakers eventually realized that Trump’s plan was a ploy to sell infrastructure assets to the highest bidder. He has been unable to develop and steer funds to any national infrastructure program worthy of the name. While there is grudging acceptance of the need to raise the gas tax, Capitol Hill is very unlikely to take that matter up in an election year. Instead, by design, he’s kicked the problem back to the states.
The entire situation is so dismal that for the first time in more than six years Transportation for America, a major progressive advocacy organization, will not push Congress to provide more money for transportation. Instead the group wants to see federal, state, and local officials; transportation advocates; and other stakeholders dive deeper into the questions of just what the federal transportation program aims to accomplish and how money can be better allocated to address issues like prioritizing maintenance.
For the White House, infrastructure is just another tool in the president’s divide-and-conquer playbook. Last week, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao announced the Rural Opportunities to Use Transportation for Economic Success (ROUTES), a new initiative designed to improve rural areas’ access to department grant programs. “Bit by bit, project by project, mile by mile, we are laying the groundwork for a better future and strong America for all our people,” she told a meeting of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. The secretary also announced a round of $225 million in bridge improvement grants, funds that will be steered primarily to rural areas.
Projects for “all our people” should include denizens of the coasts. But where their needs are concerned, the Trump administration has impeded progress. The $30 billion Gateway Program to repair and replace decaying tunnels and bridges connecting the New York-New Jersey megalopolis continues to be caught up in Trump’s personal vendetta against New York City and pols like Schumer.
Politico reported Sunday that the region’s lawmakers just found out this month that in 2018, Chao quietly toured the tunnels with Amtrak and USDOT officials in tow (rather than with the region’s Democratic senators, two of them being then–presidential candidates Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, who had asked her to join them on a tour). Meanwhile, since 2017, Trump has put bureaucratic obstacles in the project’s path and withheld funding. The administration has also terminated funding for the California High-Speed Rail initiative (the Golden State being another Trump target) and withheld funding for nearly 20 other transit projects in major urban areas like Dallas, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Seattle, and St. Petersburg. Some of those cities are in states being contested in the 2020 election, like Florida, Minnesota, and maybe even Texas.
Other infrastructure sectors that rely on significant federal monies or direction have not fared any better. The EPA’s responses to the drinking-water crises in Flint, Michigan, and Newark, New Jersey, illustrate that the Trump administration still fails to grasp the seriousness of aging drinking-water systems.
Of course, it’s an open secret that the president is also failing rural Americans. The digital divide is a major issue in rural areas that still lack 21st-century broadband connections. About 60 percent of farmers lack the internet connectivity to run businesses that increasingly rely on working with data to make decisions like purchasing new farm equipment.
That infrastructure—transportation, water, and broadband—was a major issue in the 2016 campaign came as a surprise for voters, advocates, journalists, and public officials at every level of government. “We’re going to do double, triple, quadruple, what Eisenhower did,” Trump said in April, referring to the 34th president’s establishment of the interstate highway system. Almost four years later, Trump has nothing of consequence to boast about. A man who thrives on chaos cannot tackle the infrastructure crisis or any other emergency facing this country. Trump’s failure to take infrastructure seriously is a major vulnerability and deserves a more robust public examination of the solutions that the Democratic candidates can offer.
