STOP THEM BEFORE THEY BUILD AGAIN: Trump’s Infrastructure Opportunity. Every president talks about infrastructure, but this administration actually knows how to do something about it. Thanks to Trump’s smart appointments, it has developed a strategy that really could make infrastructure again: Get the federal government out of the way. In previews of their infrastructure initiative, expected any week now, administration officials have promised to shift responsibility back to the cities and states that benefit from these projects. For too long, as I write in City Journal, politicians of both parties have pretended that it takes wise central planners to coordinate a nation’s infrastructure—a myth typically justified by pointing to the Interstate highway system, begun by Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s and lauded by its boosters ever since as “the greatest public works project in history.”

In reality, though, the Interstate system is the most powerful illustration of how a perfectly sound and seemingly simple project can be ruined by central planners. There was no need to nationalize highways, which had traditionally been a state responsibility. Pennsylvania and other states pioneered the expressway era with their own network of turnpikes, which generated plenty of revenue to maintain the roads while repaying the bondholders who financed them. But then Eisenhower and Congress, arguing that a highway network was necessary for national defense, concentrated money, power, and decision-making in Washington.

The new Interstate system, financed by gas taxes, seemed to work well at first. Drivers marveled at how they could zoom on open highways without stopping at traffic lights or toll booths. But the Interstates were ultimately doomed by the inherent inflexibility and political deal-making of a centralized system. The highways were needlessly expensive, particularly in cities. In order to get urban members of Congress to go along, Washington bribed them with extra money to build highways that obliterated neighborhoods; the projects would never have been built if cities and states had been spending their own money. The damage to cities was compounded by Washington’s one-size-fits-all requirements to build highways with wide lanes and shoulders—an attractive safety feature for an expressway through the prairies of Kansas but one that doesn’t make sense in a dense urban neighborhood.  Worst of all, the central planners outlawed tolls on new federally funded highways, thus preventing states from using a financing mechanism that would have ensured proper long-term maintenance and could be used to reduce congestion at peak times.

The result, half a century later: a highway system that no longer works. It’s horribly congested and in bad shape physically. Much of the system needs to be rebuilt because the highways are at the end of their useful life, yet there’s not even enough money to maintain the existing roads.

With Washington out of the way, the states could build Interstate 2.0, as Robert Poole of Reason calls it. But it won’t be easy persuading Congress, especially Democrats, to give up their pork barrel.