Sens. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, and Rob Portman of Ohio should all be praised for their efforts to produce bipartisan legislation that invests in the nation’s roads and bridges. But the final product is also a missed opportunity that includes far too many wasteful partisan projects, fails to credibly pay for itself, and fails to reform our nation’s inefficient infrastructure construction process.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, as the bill is known, does include $110 billion for roads and bridges and another $11 billion for road safety. This is good. The $25 billion for airports, $17 billion for ports, and $65 billion for high-speed internet are also most likely wise investments.
But then the bill starts veering off into progressive priorities that look more like Green New Deal waste than productive investment in capital formation. The legislation spends $39 billion on public transportation that should be able to fund itself. It spends $66 billion on unproven passenger rail projects, $15 billion on electric vehicles, and $21 billion on “environmental remediation.”
All this new spending would not be so bad if it were paid for through spending cuts to other programs and increased revenues through user fees. But it is not.
Utah Republican Sen. Mitt Romney may have claimed on the Senate floor that “this is a bill which is paid for,” but the Penn Wharton Budget Model, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, and Congress’s official scorekeeper, the Congressional Budget Office, all disagree. They all say the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act adds something between $256 billion and $351 billion to the debt over the next 10 years.
Most disappointing is the failure of the legislation to meaningfully reform the federal government’s infrastructure procurement process. A recent study of Interstate highway construction spending found that spending per mile of construction has increased three-fold since the 1960s. So despite better technology and better access to resources, U.S. infrastructure development is only one-third as efficient as it used to be. If we could just figure out a way to be as efficient as we were 60 years ago, then we could functionally triple our infrastructure spending power without raising actual spending by a dime.
The biggest factor driving the inefficiency of our infrastructure system is the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970. Ostensibly created to help the federal government plan better, NEPA has empowered radical environmental activists to abuse the system. They can stop or delay any federally funded project in federal court. According to the federal government, the average NEPA review of a federally funded project takes over 4.5 years, and the average cost is $4.2 million.
Sens. Mike Lee of Utah, Ted Cruz of Texas, and Kevin Cramer of North Dakota have introduced common-sense legislation that would streamline the NEPA process by both limiting such lawsuits and setting a time limit on how long federal agencies must spend complying with NEPA planning regulations.
It was inspiring to see both parties finally come together and produce legislation that funded some long needed capital investments. Hopefully next time they’ll find a way to pay for these investments and make some common-sense reforms that will make those investment dollars much more efficient.
