Want More Infrastructure? Make It Cheaper to Build
The Biden administration will be better on infrastructure than its predecessor. But it needs to find ways to reduce this country’s sky-high construction costs.
None of this is cheap.
Photographer: William Thomas Cain/Getty Images North AmericaEarly on in Donald Trump’s presidency, increased infrastructure investment seemed like it might be a big winner for him, a populist policy with bipartisan appeal. Instead, Trump’s “infrastructure weeks” became a running joke and federal infrastructure spending fell. As a share of gross domestic product, federal outlays for major non-defense physical capital investments in fiscal year 2019 were the lowest they’ve been since 1957.
There are reasons to hope this will change under President-elect Joe Biden, who has big plans for investment in roads, transit and clean energy, among other things, and a better record than Trump of actually getting infrastructure built (as vice president he was in charge of overseeing spending from the $800 billion stimulus bill enacted in 2009).