Democrats are unenthused.
During his campaign, Donald Trump promised to spend $1 trillion on an infrastructure program that he likened to those of the New Deal era. When Hillary Clinton called for $275 billion in infrastructure investment, the Republican nominee vowed to spend at least twice that sum.
Last month, the White House released a budget that allocated $200 billion for spurring public-private partnerships in infrastructure investment — while cutting $144 billion from direct public spending on infrastructure.
The president has yet to release the full details of his new vision for repairing America’s crumbling roads and bridges. But a report from the New York Times on Saturday suggested that Trump’s new plan for federal infrastructure spending is to reduce it:
On the first day of Infrastructure Week (which is, apparently, a monthly event) , Trump unveiled the first pillar of his new plan: the privatization of America’s air traffic control system.
At present, the Federal Aviation Administration’s system oversees 50,000 flights per day, and is regarded as one of the safest in the world. However, the FAA has been slow to transition from its radar-based system to a more modern, GPS-based one, despite the latter’s potential for enabling quicker routes. The FAA maintains that it has been working diligently to modernize its system, but these efforts have been hobbled by Congress’s failure to supply consistent funding.
On Monday, Trump argued that public-sector red tape and inefficiency were responsible for the FAA’s backwardness. Thus, the president proposed outsourcing air traffic control to a “self-financing, nonprofit organization” that would be funded via user fees, instead of taxes.
The government would still regulate this private company for safety purposes, and over 30,000 FAA employees would retain their jobs, union, and “similar” benefits after being reassigned to the quasi-private sector.
The proposal enjoys strong support from the major airlines. In reporter David Dayen’s view, that fact is a testament to the measure’s flaws:
Regardless, Democrats are unenthused. There was a time when one could have imagined Trump using his infrastructure ambitions to court bipartisan support — or else, to drive a wedge between Team Blue’s pragmatists and its stalwart resisters. But now that Trump’s infrastructure plan appears to consist of schemes for privatizing public resources — and helping Saudi Arabia invest in American toll roads — there’s little dissension in the Democratic ranks.
“The entire focus of the President’s infrastructure ‘proposal’ is on privatization, which sounds like a nice word but when you scratch beneath the surface it means much less construction and far fewer jobs, particularly in rural areas, ” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Monday. “It means Trump tolls from one end of America to the other, and huge profits for financiers who, when they put up the money, want to be repaid by the average driver, worker and citizen.”
