The plan President Trump unveiled this week for repairing the nation’s crumbling infrastructure isn’t getting much love in the media or in Congress, in part because there isn’t much to it.
Trump’s $1 trillion infrastructure plan only includes $200 billion in actual government spending, with the rest coming from unnamed private investors incentivized by a “mixture of loans and grants” and empowered by Trump’s deregulatory agenda. A White House fact sheet presents ideas such as lifting restrictions on tolls in the interstate highway system and opening rest areas to private investment.
While short on specifics, the White House press release announcing the plan dedicates a good deal of ink to ridiculing President Obama’s 2009 stimulus package as an “expensive waste” of more than $800 billion.
Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle have reportedly balked at Trump’s infrastructure plan. Progressive Democrats are pushing their own proposal, which would simply spend $2 trillion over the next decade on fixing up roads, bridges and crumbling sewer and drinking water delivery systems.
The president’s proposal for bolstering infrastructure development with a vaguely defined partnership between the public and private sectors has policymakers looking to infrastructure investment models in other countries for guidance as to what his policies might look like in the real world. One country that keeps coming up in media coverage is Australia, where the government has experimented with a model known as “asset recycling.”
Asset recycling is basically the practice of selling off existing public infrastructure to private investors in order to pay for new infrastructure, and critics say the model fast-tracks privatization deals that prioritize profit margins over the needs of the public. Rather than being a model to replicate, Australia’s experiment provides a cautionary tale to US policymakers because its asset-recycling program amounted to “expensive loans with long-term concession contracts that have had problematic features,” according to In the Public Interest (ITPI), a progressive think tank.
“The Trump infrastructure plan would put a giant ‘for sale’ sign on the country’s roads, bridges, water systems and other infrastructure,” said Donald Cohen, ITPI’S executive director. “Rather than invest in America’s future, the plan would encourage cities and states to hand over public infrastructure to Wall Street and global corporations.”
In Trump’s vision, it seems that what’s best for public infrastructure is assumed to be what’s best for big business. In a nod to Trump’s supporters in the coal and oil industries, which are arguably the intended beneficiaries of his decision to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement, the White House points out that the nation’s inland waterways where coal, oil and steel are transported have “been allowed to fall apart” and require $8.7 billion in maintenance work.
Trump announced his plan on the banks of the Ohio River in Cincinnati, where he abruptly stopped in the middle of his speech to wave at the captain of a barge stationed behind him.
Australia’s asset recycling program was introduced in 2014 but was formally ended two years later because former Prime Minister Tony Abbott was unable to convince lawmakers to fund it due to mounting concerns over the program’s effectiveness, according to ITPI.
The White House has explored asset recycling as a model, and reports indicate that Trump has considered offering state and local governments a “bonus” for selling off some of their assets. Australia offered a 15 percent subsidy to states and territories, which encouraged hasty decisions to privatize public assets. One territory leased a port to a Chinese company for 99 years without determining where the proceeds would go.
Another cautionary tale comes out of Chicago, where the city contracted private companies to run its parking meters and locked itself into a contract that caused parking prices to skyrocket, according to ITPI.
“Asset recycling is Chicago’s parking meter deal on steroids. It incentivizes making shortsighted deals with private investors,” Cohen said. “In what world does it make sense for the federal government to encourage cities and states to rush to sell off public assets?”
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
Last week, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy