Why Infrastructure is Always on the News

It's about the future: Moving things faster, more efficiently and more democratically (er, cheaper) – three advances that have historically obsessed Americans.

The chattering class has made much ado about Ron Klain, President Joe Biden’s former chief of staff, taking a swipe at his ex-boss. The president, according to Klain, was spending too much time visiting new bridge sites — and all the other infrastructure created under his administration’s massive new building program.

Not a good idea, Klain asserted: These infrastructure projects are about the past and Biden needs to focus on the future. Elections are about what a president is going to do, not what he’s already done.

Infrastructure, however, is always about the future. It’s about moving things faster, more efficiently and more democratically (er, cheaper) – three advances that have historically obsessed Americans.

That could be one reason why news about the Mar. 26 collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore was so compelling. As we learned, infrastructure involves far more than concrete, brick and mortar. The sordid history of the construction industry’s racist policies was noted in a smart opinion piece by Roger House in The Hill.

In fact, race often comes up when the topic is Francis Scott Key, a slave owner. It’s regularly cited in the long-running effort to change our national anthem from “The Star Spangled Banner,” with lyrics written by Scott. Just what it should be changed to is regularly debated.  

For me, infrastructure is always topical. News keeps happening and this older post on the subject (from 2021, so it now has a few tweaks), still seems right on it. Check it out:

Infrastructure Week has finally arrived.

Early in his term, President Joe Biden announced his infrastructure initiative, the second key component of his legislative agenda. Biden is aiming to rebuild, revitalize and all around reimagine the nation’s physical and technological infrastructure — and the U.S. economy. Not just bridges, roads, airports and railways, but water systems, electrical grids and broadband networks. His sweeping program also includes a critical green component, including retrofitting older buildings and capping methane leaks on oil wells.

U.S. infrastructure has been in an abysmal state for decades. (Civil engineers now grade it at C-, an improvement from the D+ of a few years back.) Texas was warned about its insecure electrical grid more than a decade ago. Flint’s contaminated water system alerted Americans in 2014 that aging corroded pipes could be endangering public health nationwide. The deadly 2007 collapse of the I-35W Mississippi Bridge, one of Minneapolis’s essential arteries, forced cities to survey their own aging roadways.

Yet infrastructure, like Mark Twain said about the weather, is something everybody talks about but nobody does anything about. During the Trump administration, it became a standing joke that “Infrastructure Week” was just around the corner. Trump supporters continued to believe that the master builder in the White House would fix all the problems.

Biden, though, signaled his serious infrastructure plans when he named Pete Buttigieg as his Transportation secretary. The former Indiana mayor emerged from the 2020 presidential campaign as an erudite phenom who is remarkably fast on his feet. He’s a savvy choice to walk — and talk — point on this for the Biden administration.

I have long been fascinated by infrastructure – yet another powerful legacy of my first real job, as researcher for Tom Wicker, the New York Times Op-Ed columnist and associate editor. He was a big believer in trains. So, I was soon intimately familiar with the sorry saga of Amtrak.  

It followed that I was a fan-girl for investment banker Felix G. Rohatyn’s proposals on how to fund major improvements for our failing infrastructure. The late Lazard Freres pooh-bah, who had played a key role in helping New York City elude bankruptcy in 1975, envisioned a public-private infrastructure bank as one way to dig out of the 2008 economic collapse. He argued that infrastructure financing must be viewed as an investment rather than an expense and Washington should establish a national capital budget for infrastructure. Rohatyn pressed forward with the idea for more than a decade.

As Opinion editor, I asked him to write op-ed pieces about this at three different publications – so often that he once asked me why he needed to write it anew. Here is a version he wrote for me almost a decade ago at Politico: Time for a U.S. infrastructure bank. (I grabbed any peg I could -- an Obama speech was the peg that time.)

I’ve also been a sucker for improving our electric grid – another topic that most people didn’t have much cause to reflect on. But the Texas grid catastrophe made this problem clear to the entire nation. The grid is very much a part of my infrastructure obsession. Here’s a piece I engineered and edited at Politico more than a decade ago: U.S. must power up grid overhaul.

The grave infrastructure problems raised in these pieces have only intensified in the intervening years.

We’ll now see how much Biden’s infrastructure program can actually accomplish.