With the $1.9 trillion U.S. COVID relief bill passed, President Joe Biden is already looking toward his next big priority – fixing America’s infrastructure.
Biden is expected to outline his infrastructure plan more fully in a joint address to Congress this month and provide more details in April so that lawmakers will have several months to work on a spending bill before the August recess. The White House has already added infrastructure experts to the administration and discussed the topic with lawmakers, reports Reuters.
The news comes as a report released this month by the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the country’s infrastructure a grade of C-, lifting it from the D range for the first time in 20 years, according to the Financial Times.
The 2021 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure is published every four years, describing the condition and performance of American infrastructure in the familiar form of a school report card – assigning letter grades based on the physical condition and needed investments for improvement.
The report also warns that “the COVID-19 pandemic’s impacts on infrastructure revenue streams threaten to derail the modest progress we’ve made over the past four years.” And this statement is an interesting one, given that the definition of infrastructure will need to be expanded to include climate change and its effects, as well as the post-pandemic era we are approaching.
How do we define infrastructure?
Infrastructure is a general term used to describe the basic physical systems of a business, region, or nation.
The reader can probably guess what makes up our country’s infrastructure. Think of transportation systems, communication networks, sewage, water, and electric systems. But there is more, much more, to be included in these broader “systems.”
Infrastructure is quite literally, the foundation on which a country’s economy is built. Let’s take the transportation system as an example. Not only are we looking at highways, bridges, railroads, and waterways, but today, we also need to include EV charging stations for electric vehicles,
Accessibility is also a consideration. Fully 45 percent of Americans have no access to transit. Meanwhile, much of the existing system is aging, and transit agencies often lack sufficient funds to keep their existing systems in good working order.
Over a 10-year period across the country, 19 percent of transit vehicles, and 6 percent of fixed guideway elements like tracks and tunnels were rated in “poor” condition. Currently, there is a $176 billion transit backlog, a deficit that is expected to grow to more than $270 billion through 2029.
America’s infrastructure report card gives the nation a grade of C- overall in the state of our infrastructure. But even though the grade is somewhat better than in the past two decades, there is a water main break somewhere every two minutes, 43 percent of our public roadways are in poor or mediocre condition, a number that has remained stagnant over the past several years.
There are 30,000 miles of inventoried levees across the U.S., and an additional 10,000 miles of levees whose location and condition are unknown, according to the report.
Defining infrastructure in today’s climate
The Biden administration wants to expand the definition of infrastructure to include items aimed at tackling climate change and its effects, echoing the $2 trillion, 10-year “Build Back Better” proposal floated during his campaign.
This would include EV charging stations, zero-emission buses, and zero-carbon electricity generation by 2035, as well as directing dollars to minority neighborhoods and contractors – part of a pledge to increase racial equity.
U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Friday that she had directed senior Democrats to begin working with Republicans on a “big, bold and transformational infrastructure package.”
“Big and bold” is how Democrats want to define an infrastructure package, but they are giving it a broader definition than the Republicans. Stephen Volkmann, a machinery and industrials analyst at Jefferies, the investment bank, says, “So they put through a big plan that includes broadband and public transit, while the Republicans think of roads and bridges,” he points out. “That’s part of the reason they can’t agree on things.”
There are a number of issues that neither party wants to pursue, like raising fuel taxes, a key source of revenue that has not increased since 1993. We will just have to follow this story to see what Congress will decide. But the longer we wait, the worse our infrastructure is going to become.
