Dems may be too late with projects
In politics, timing is everything. Democrats have a timing problem.
At issue is the rollout of the $1.2 trillion infrastructure program passed by bipartisan votes in Congress, but whose journey through the congressional meat grinder was largely engineered by Democrats, including the Biden White House.
The fact is the effort to revamp America’s crumbling roads, bridges, water systems, and the like may be a political wash for Democrats.
While the Biden administration aims to have some projects in progress before next year’s mid-term elections, a Brookings Institution study throws a cold light on the idea of quick and easy implementation of the legislation.
Indeed, so few projects are likely to be underway by next year or in two or three years that Democrats may fail to reap the political rewards they’ve come to expect.
“It will take years to start seeing (infrastructure) projects in our communities,” the Brookings paper concludes. “Most projects will not happen overnight.”
According to Brookings, the pace of build-back will depend on the “types of projects” involved as well staff hirings, “internal planning (and) internal and public reviews.”
The Brookings memo also lists the requirement to “build knowledge resources to stand-up new operations” as pure an example of bureaucratic gibberish as you’re likely to find. The wording has all the earmarks of governmental drivel trailing after reams of red tape.
To Democrats eager to deliver the goods, it points to maddening delays in getting things up and running. This failure to produce, and to produce quickly, runs the risk of turning voters off, or of not turning them on.
Mitch Landrieu, the former mayor of New Orleans tapped by President Biden to oversee things, said during a recent appearance on MSNBC that the infrastructure initiative “is a three-, five-, 10-year proposal.”
He added, “What the president’s asking us to do is use the policy to rebuild the country.”
Rebuilds are not achieved overnight or even in six months.
Nor are voters known for patiently waiting while bureaucrats get their studies in order. There is scant appreciation for the time and skill required to spring new legislation to life.
Voters want to see results. They need to see results. They expect to see results. Seeing is believing.
Brookings, Washington’s original think tank, makes a strong case for the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the administration’s Build Back Better plan still awaiting Senate action.
“America finally has a generation-defining infrastructure bill,” wrote a team of scholars led by Brookings senior fellow Adie Tomer, “and if (Build Back Better) comes through, too, America will begin a building spree larger than what happened during the New Deal” in the 1930s, in response to the Great Depression.
At $550 billion in new spending over five years, it may even surpass the record amount spent on infrastructure between the late 1970s and early 1980s, when large chunks of the interstate highway system were still being built, Tomer writes.
For his part, President Biden has emphasized that most of the jobs created by the Building a Better America programs will be filled by blue-collar workers, many of whom are Republican voters or identify as independents.
The president visited Republican Kansas last Wednesday, touting the impact the infrastructure-rebuild will have on public transportation in and around Kansas City.
He stressed, “We’re going to rebuild the economy, but this time from the bottom and middle out. This bill is a blue-collar blueprint for working Americans.”
“It’s going to be (an) infrastructure decade,” President Biden said. “No more talking. Action.”
To drive that point home, the White House recently unveiled an infrastructure web page, Build.gov.
But in the absence of concrete being poured, will the president’s words and the website be enough to help stem what looks like a Republican tide in the 2022 mid-terms, now less than a year away?
Democrats will need help – the kind maybe best exemplified by Pennsylvania Grange president Wayne Campbell, who remarked in this newspaper last week on federal infrastructure funding for rural broadband.
“Funding … is welcome news,” Campbell wrote. “Pennsylvania is on the verge of connecting communities with technology … help is on the way.”
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.