Donald Trump's trillion-dollar infrastructure plan is not going to work out


03/03/2017

A month before becoming president in 2009, Barack Obama promised to implement a fairly ambitious program for infrastructure renewal by reconstruction of roads and bridges of the USA, which also would create a large number of jobs.



Gage Skidmor
Then, Obama suggested that ready-to-start projects would help in this process, but two years later he found what Donald Trump appears to learn soon: there is no such thing as projects ready to be implemented.

Speaking in the US Congress on 28 February, Donald Trump said he intends to draft a bill providing for allocation of $ 1 trillion investments to build roads, bridges, tunnels, airports and other infrastructure, which condition remains wanting. According to Trump, this project will involve millions of Americans.

Obama once recognized that implementation of such projects need to go through a number of bureaucratic procedures, which could take several years, sometimes even decades. As noted by William Ibbs, professor of construction management at the University of California at Berkeley and President of Ibbs Consulting Group, it took 23 years to replace a bridge in San Francisco damaged during an earthquake in 1989.

Large and important projects could not be implemented simply just because of the fact that they have received funding. There should be a long-term and well-developed forecast for their implementation, said Sarah Kline, a member of Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington.

Donald Trump gave no details of his plan for infrastructure renewal and how funding will be allocated. At the same time, Republicans and Democrats disagreed over the extent of federal spending. Majority Leader in the US Senate Mitch McConnell said he wanted to avoid incentives worth trillions of dollars.

However, Trump still wants to shorten time for approval of priority infrastructure projects in various instances which cannot be influenced by the federal government. Head of the White House even signed several orders in the first week after his inauguration to do this. However, experts believe that it is unlikely that the system will be changed fundamentally because of a large number of players involved in the process.

source: bloomberg.com