President Trump presented his infrastructure plan, declaring, “It is time to give Americans the working, modern infrastructure they deserve.”
The Trump administration will be allocating approximately $200 billion of its $1.5 trillion infrastructure investment plan over the next 10 years to building or repairing roads, bridges, airports, seaports, energy projects and water systems. The goal of the plan is to attract the additional capital from states, localities and private investors.
Approximately $100 billion would be used as direct grants to local governments to help trigger investment; $50 billion would go to projects in rural areas in the form of block grants; $20 billion to large projects that can “lift the American spirit;” and $30 billion for miscellaneous existing infrastructure programs.
In just a few short days, the plans has stirred up significant controversy.
Many media outlets are saying that is not enough capital to support Trump’s program. Bloomberg writer Barry Ritholtz says, “Forget modernizing America’s infrastructure; this number is deeply inadequate to the task of even doing basic maintenance on bridges, highways and roads. And it is light years away from closing the almost $5 trillion shortfall in infrastructure investment.”
An editorial in The Los Angeles Times calls the plan a fantasy.
And The New York Times’ article titled “Trump’s Infrastructure Plan Puts Burden On State And Private Money” states: “President Trump’s $200 billion plan to rebuild America upends the criteria that have long been used to pick ambitious federal projects, putting little emphasis on how much an infrastructure proposal benefits the public and more on finding private investors and other outside sources of money.”
Farm Futures praises the plan it its article “Trump’s infrastructure plan praised for rural investment.”
Competitive Enterprise Institute lists the good, the bad and the ugly of the new plan.
Forbes says the new approach in which states have a voice in which projects to fund is “neither inherently good nor bad, but it is a significant departure from how our country has approached infrastructure in the past. Over the last 60 years, government has been considered the authority on major building projects.”
