3/26/2023 0 Comments Political gridlock![]() It’s why we’re not just watching what happens on the Hill these next couple years, but why we all should carefully watch the infrastructure and trade platforms put together by the Democratic candidates for president. Washington has the chance to give long-run certainty to our state and local partners, who build all the projects and pay the majority of costs, anyway.īut if political compromise doesn’t happen- and we have our doubts-the pressure will only be higher on the next Congress and president to deliver a more collaborative, bipartisan vision for the country’s future. If the two parties can craft a bill that boosts investment around long-run needs-from resilience to electrification to digitalization-and reduce tariff impacts in the process, we’ll all be in a better place. That’s why these next two- and four-year periods are so important at the federal level.įor the nearly two years remaining on President’s Trump term, there is a major negotiation coming with congressional Democrats around our next surface transportation bill, if not a larger infrastructure package. They’re all guaranteed ways to raise infrastructure costs in the long-term and reduce public trust today. Similarly, Congress and the Federal Aviation Administration cannot agree on how to manage and comprehensively fund a new satellite-based air traffic control system. Department of Transportation has now twice delayed promised capital grants to local transit agencies. Politics disrupting our infrastructure stretches far beyond tariff fights. Oddly enough, while the president pushes a trade war to boost global competitiveness, our domestic infrastructure will be less prepared to power our economy once the war is over. The net result: lower quality infrastructure than if the country never instituted the new tariffs. If the tariffs remain in future years-and the politically-motivated rhetoric suggests the president will keep them-the effects will only compound as more projects are either delayed or outright scrapped. So, when current projects start costing significantly more, agencies have no choice but to delay other projects. Since infrastructure agencies work on tight budgets and are naturally capital-constrained, there’s only so much construction to go around. Price increases can act as a fiscal virus, infecting an agency’s entire project pipeline. have been hit hard by the costs, needing to lay off workers to close budget gaps. Meanwhile, steel and aluminum manufacturers in the U.S. As Mark Niquette at Bloomberg reported, states from California to Michigan to Virginia have already seen certain project costs jump by millions of dollars. This directly impacts our state departments of transportation, their local peers, and water authorities who all rely on steel and aluminum to construct major capital projects. Since the Trump administration applied tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, the cost index for steel mill products alone rose by almost 14 percent from March 2018 to January 2019. This administration’s trade and tariff policies serve as a potent example of self-inflicted economic harm. We can no longer afford this kind of unnecessary economic harm due to short-sighted politics. While the budget fight may be over (for now), our political system is regularly causing less perceptible but more sustained disruptions to our road, water, and other physical networks. Then, 35 days after the shutdown began, LaGuardia Airport closed due to staffing shortages. ![]() With public employees and contractors forced to work without pay during the budget shutdown, it was little surprise that TSA security officers and air traffic controllers started calling in sick. Put bluntly, when political discord leads to infrastructure failure, it doesn’t just deepen our distrust of government-it also takes our economy down with it.Īfter all, it was only months ago when fights between House Democrats and the Republican White House spilled over into our airports. While these concepts and conversations suggest bipartisanship could deliver infrastructure reform, the current state of national politics delivers anything but an infrastructure boost.
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