“Infrastructure week” became a running joke early in this vaporware administration. The New York Times counted ten such weeks through March 2020. Donald Trump invoked his $1 trillion plan for remaking America’s crumbling roads and bridges and creating jobs whenever he needed a distraction from the scandal du jour. Or else the scandal du jour rendered any rollout stillborn. Infrastructure weeks are like the acting president’s forever promise to present his plan to replace the Affordable Care Act “in about two weeks,” as he has periodically since taking office coming on four years ago.
The pitch has all but disappeared. The need has not, K. Sabeel Rahman writes in The Atlantic:
When I refer to public infrastructure, I mean something much more expansive than roads and bridges; I mean the full range of goods, services, and investments needed for communities to thrive: physical utilities such as water, parks, and transit; basics such as housing, child care, and health care; and economic safety-net supports such as food stamps and unemployment insurance. But under America’s reigning ideology, public infrastructure like this is seen as costly, inefficient, outdated, and low-quality, while private alternatives are valorized as more dynamic, efficient, and modern. This ideology is also highly racialized. Universal services open to a multiracial public are vilified, coded in dog-whistle politics as an undeserved giveaway to communities of color at the expense of white constituents. The result has been a systematic defunding of public infrastructure since the 1970s.
Same as it ever was. The “taxes are theft” ideology promoted for decades proved convenient rationale for allowing the slow decay of systems once seen as symbols of American dynamism. The only ways to justify public works spending was if public investment was limited and if private hands stood to profit not just from the building of them, but the operation too. Fiscal conservatives never really objected to spending taxes so long as they flowed into the right pockets and did not benefit the Irresponsibles.
On an economic score alone, massive investments in public infrastructure would pay off. Every dollar invested in transit infrastructure generates at least $3.70 in returns through new jobs, reduced congestion, and increased productivity, without accounting for the environmental and health benefits. For each dollar invested in early-childhood education, the result is $8.60 worth of economic benefit largely through reductions in crime and poverty. A universal health-care system would save Americans more than $2 trillion in health-care costs (even accounting for the increased public expenditure that would be needed) while securing access to life-saving care for more than 30 million Americans. The fact that federal and state governments fail to make these investments is not a matter of limited resources, but rather of skewed priorities. The 2017 Trump tax cuts of $1.9 trillion sent most of its gains to corporations and the wealthiest Americans; the United States has spent more than $820 billion on the Iraq War since 2003, and hundreds of billions every year to fund the prison-industrial complex.
Rahman observes public-investment (or lack of it) reflects “who and what we value: Too often, the decision to underinvest in public infrastructure has stemmed from a desire to restrict access to those goods and services for people of color, in an attempt to preserve the benefits of public infrastructure for wealthier and whiter communities.”
President Barack Obama’s stimulus spending during the Great Recession planted signs across America announcing public works projects. Republicans blasted them as partisan propaganda. Clearly, Acting President Donald Trump would not have missed the chance to plant even more roadside monuments emblazoned with his own name if he gave infrastructure any serious thought. Which of course he has not.
With control of the U.S. Senate, a President Joe Biden might actually do what “President Vaporware” has not. He might redefine the very concept of public infrastructure, Rahman suggests:
First, the public needs to broaden its conceptions of public goods and infrastructure. Beyond roads and bridges, reformers should focus on those services and systems that are essential for full-fledged membership and well-being, that expand the capabilities and capacities of individuals and communities, and where leaving the provision in private hands would create too great a risk of exclusion or unfair, arbitrary, and extractive pricing. Concretely, this means focusing on two types of public infrastructure in particular: foundational back-end services such as water, electricity, mail, credit, broadband, and the like; and the safety net and systems for community care, including health care, child care, public schools, and more.
Second, we need to ensure that these infrastructures are, in fact, public. That means subjecting them to stringent regulations ensuring quality, nondiscrimination, fair pricing, and equitable access. It might mean outright public provision—either through a public option as in the health-care debate, or through outright nationalization or municipalization. And it means creating oversight to ensure racial and gender equity in access, just as the Civil Rights Act led to the creation of administrative offices charged with preventing discrimination and resegregation in access to services including hospital health care.
The immediate barrier to a Biden “build back better” effort is decay in the instruments of governance themselves. Years of Republican efforts to neuter government, to privatize what once was public, and to concentrate veto power in whichever bodies Republicans control (including the courts) have left an incoming Democratic administration needing to rebuild America’s governing infrastructure as well.
Reflecting on Republican efforts to affect through the courts what they could not through legislation, Michelle Goldberg observes:
Republicans did all this because they could. Now that Democrats might respond in kind, diluting conservative control of the courts and thus depriving Republicans of their prize for enabling Trump, Republicans have the audacity to pose as scandalized norm-protectors.
Should they win control of Congress and the presidency, Democrats really do hope to restore some of the checks and balances immolated by Trumpism. Consider the Protecting Our Democracy Act, an omnibus reform bill introduced by Democratic leaders in the House that would, among other things, strengthen Congress’s subpoena power, limit presidents’ use of emergency declarations, and make it harder for them to use acting appointments to circumvent the Senate confirmation process.
Democrats fully understand that this bill would constrain Joe Biden’s power, particularly if Republicans won back control of Congress in the 2022 midterms. Last month Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told me that that’s why he expects some Republicans to vote for it. “Republicans would never want a Democratic president to do half the things that Donald Trump has done,” he said. This bill exists because Democrats don’t either.
It will take more that a week to build back what the Midas cult has either allowed to decay or actively destroyed. It will take a season or several presidential terms.
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