Trump Administration: Infrastructure Friend or Foe?

[Commentary] As a candidate, Donald Trump deserved credit for identifying a policy that damages jobs, competitiveness, and economic growth: underinvestment in infrastructure. Unfortunately, Trump’s plans as president, including his budget and tax proposals, in combination with congressional politics, suggest his overall impact on infrastructure will make a bad situation worse. Would the long-promised $1 trillion infrastructure fund more than make up for the problems the tax bill creates? The answer is no. A

s President Trump finally admitted, his plan will not work. Candidate Trump’s plan was premised on attracting private capital to fund infrastructure. But that would only help projects that directly produce revenues, leaving out such needed projects as local roads, schools, and fire stations, among others. Public funding is essential to building a broad coalition necessary to move forward with a national infrastructure bill. Private financing not only limits the kinds of projects financed, but also limits where the projects will be located. Other than in broadband, nearly all the kinds of infrastructure projects—airports, transit, bridges—capable of attracting the kinds of revenue necessary to secure funding, are in metropolitan areas. That would limit the political attractiveness of any legislation to rural congressional members, whose voting block is sizable. The administration’s tax plan, however, now makes the fiscal politics for public funds impossible. In short: Trump’s tax plan would decrease funds for the principal sources of infrastructure financing; his original infrastructure plan is dead; and his tax plan will put the country in a position where no infrastructure plan is likely to move forward. That combination would only intensify national infrastructure challenges.

[Blair Levin is a nonresident senior fellow with the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program. Adie Tomer is a fellow at the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program and leads the Metropolitan Infrastructure Initiative.]