According to a new report titled America’s Trillion-Dollar Repair Bill: Capital Budgeting and the Disclosure of State Infrastructure Needs, the national deferred maintenance cost of repairs to America’s crumbling infrastructure may cost at least $1 trillion.
The report, authored by Volcker Alliance, points out few states actually disclose the cost of necessary infrastructure repairs in their budget documents, as revealed in Volcker’s 2018 study, Truth and Integrity in State Budgeting: Preventing the Next Fiscal Crisis. And while 80 percent of public infrastructure spending comes from state and local governments, it is not enough to address the critical need to repair public assets, such as roads, highways, waterworks, and buildings.
“Although infrastructure is widely regarded as a national concern, capital budgeting practices differ widely from state to state, reflecting America’s composition as a republic of fifty individual sovereign entit
