In 2021, Joe Biden proudly announced that America would finally address its infrastructure problems. He got Congress to pass the $1.2 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) to fix neglected roads, bridges, airports, and ports.
State and local governments eagerly got in line for the goodies. But here we are, four years later, and few projects have been approved and fewer have begun.
What's the holdup?
City Journal's Judge Glock explains how the Brent Spence Bridge connecting Covington, Kentucky, and Cincinnati, Ohio, has been mired in environmental and DEI red tape. The allocation of $1.6 billion in 2021 has not resulted in any dirt being moved.
Why?
Environmental lawsuits and debates over how to spend the funds “equitably” had delayed the project, seemingly indefinitely. Progressive demands required the spending to include bicycle paths, stormwater diversion projects, a diversity and inclusion outreach committee, participation goals for minority-owned businesses, contributions to a bat-conservation fund, a salvage and relocation effort for local mussels, peregrine falcon inspections to ensure that none was nearby at the start of construction, facade improvements in Covington’s Lewisburg historic district, refurbishment of original lettering on a historic freight building—and so on.
This reminds me of the $42 billion rural broadband boondoggle, also part of the infrastructure bill, that has yet to serve anyone, whether rural or city folk.
"States had to prove that they promoted participation from minority-owned businesses, women-owned businesses, and “other socially or economically disadvantaged individual-owned businesses," according to The Free Press.
They also had to create a Five-Year Action Plan that required collaborating with unions and "underrepresented communities," including prisoners, LGBTQ individuals, women, and minorities.
Getting anything done in leftist America is proving to be a nightmare of unnecessary rules, regulations, and woke nonsense that costs time and billions of dollars.
The trouble with the BIL was that many in the Biden administration and progressive circles weren’t especially interested in traditional infrastructure; after all, highways and airports ran on fossil fuels and disrupted ecosystems. Their priorities lay elsewhere: bike trails, union carve-outs, climate initiatives, and “environmental justice” programs. Sold as a plan to fix what was broken, the law became a vehicle for reshaping how Americans live and move. The result has been a slow-rolling fiasco.
"Even under the most generous reading, less than a third of the BIL’s funding went to roads, and only about half supported the traditional surface transportation projects in such bills," the article continues.
The left has no real interest in building anything. Their interest is in pleasing their radical constituencies, who don't care when the project is completed as long as they get their cut.
This isn't graft. It's a grift.
Cars account for 90% of surface passenger miles traveled in the U.S. The Biden administration bragged about the $350 billion in the BIL that many believed would be giant leap forward in repairing roads and bridges.
Think again.
But the two largest programs in the bill—the Surface Transportation Block Grant Program and the National Highway Performance Program, which distributed funds to states and totaled two-thirds of supposed road and bridge spending—did not just provide funds for roads. The BIL allowed states to use the money for electric-vehicle charging stations, wildlife crossings, recreational trails, “natural infrastructure” like environmental restoration, and even “control of noxious weeds.” It also permitted state agencies to redirect up to half of those funds to efforts even further from transportation, including carbon reduction, air-quality improvement, and climate-change “resilience” programs. Over $7 billion was earmarked for “transportation alternatives”—meaning substitutes for roads, such as bike trails.
Many of these woke policies are embedded in government transportation spending and need to be weeded out before the wheels can start turning again.
We will spend years trying to repair the damage done by Joe Biden to the efficient operation of government.
