Why Can't We Build Anything?

Future

- By Katherine Mangu-Ward

“We’re Going to fix them all,” President Joe Biden vowed, awkwardly showing up to give a speech promoting his $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill just hours after Pittsburgh’s Fern Hollow Bridge collapsed in January. “We’re sending the money.”

It is true that the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act includes $40 billion in funding to improve the nation’s 43,000 bridges, though that’s a relatively small amount compared to the $156 billion it includes for mass transit and rail (on top of the $70 billion that went to mass transit in pandemic relief), plus the hundreds of billions in additional spending on broadband, green energy, and other stuffthat only looks like infrastructure if you squint.

But it’s not true that Washington is actually “sending the money.” Because of Congress’ longstanding inability to perform one of its most basic functions—pass a budget—significant swathes of transportation spending are stalled at 2020 levels. In November, the infrastructure bill did indeed authorize over a trillion in spending. But before all of that money can actually head out the door, there needs to be an appropriations bill in place as well.

Carlos Monje, the undersecretary for policy at the Transportation Department, explained in late January that “the department has begun to move forward on as many aspects of the bill as we can, but some programs are hampered by legislative challenges resulting from the constraints that are in the continuing resolution.”