It’s 'Infrastructure Week,' At Last!

Infrastructure Week has finally arrived.

At his recent news conference, President Joe Biden announced he is set to launch his infrastructure initiative, the second key component of his legislative agenda, with a major speech in Pittsburgh on Wednesday. Biden is aiming to rebuild, revitalize and all around reimagine the nation’s physical and technological infrastructure — and the U.S. economy. Not just bridges, roads, airports and railways, but water systems, electrical grids and broadband networks.

His sweeping program reportedly includes a critical green component: building systems of electric car-charging networks, sealing retrofitted windows and doors on homes and businesses, capping methane leaks on oil wells, installing solar panels on hundreds of thousands of buildings.

U.S. infrastructure has been in an abysmal state for decades. (Civil engineers now grade it at C-, an improvement from the D+ of a few years back.) Texas was warned about its insecure electrical grid more than a decade ago. Flint’s contaminated water system alerted Americans in 2014 that aging corroded pipes could be endangering public health nationwide. The deadly 2007 collapse of the I-35W Mississippi Bridge, one of Minneapolis’s essential arteries, forced cities to survey their own aging roadways.

Yet infrastructure, like Mark Twain said about the weather, is something everybody talks about but nobody does anything about. During the Trump administration, it became a standing joke that “Infrastructure Week” was just around the corner. (Trump supporters continued to believe that the master builder in the White House would fix all the problems.)

Biden, however, signaled his serious infrastructure plans when he named Pete Buttigieg as his Transportation secretary. The former Indiana mayor emerged from the 2020 presidential campaign as an erudite phenom who is remarkably fast on his feet. He’s a savvy choice to walk — and talk — point on this for the Biden administration.

I have long been fascinated by infrastructure – yet another powerful legacy of my first real job, as researcher for Tom Wicker, the New York Times Op-Ed columnist and associate editor. He was a big believer in trains. So, I was soon intimately familiar with the sorry saga of Amtrak.  

It followed that I was a fan-girl for investment banker Felix G. Rohatyn’s proposals on how to fund major improvements for our failing infrastructure. The Lazard Freres pooh-bah, who had played a key role in helping New York City elude bankruptcy in 1975, envisioned a public-private infrastructure bank as one way to dig out of the 2008 economic collapse. He argued that infrastructure financing must be viewed as an investment rather than an expense and Washington should establish a national capital budget for infrastructure. Rohatyn pressed forward with the idea for more than a decade.

As Opinion editor, I asked him to write op-ed pieces about it at three different publications – so often that he once asked me why he needed to write it anew. Here is a version he wrote for me almost a decade ago at Politico: Time for a U.S. infrastructure bank. (I grabbed any peg I could -- an Obama speech was the peg that time.)

I’ve also been a sucker for improving the electric grid – another topic that most people didn’t have much cause to reflect on. But the recent Texas catastrophe made this problem clear to the entire nation. The grid is very much a part of my infrastructure obsession. Here’s a piece I engineered and edited at Politico more than a decade ago: U.S. must power up grid overhaul.

The grave infrastructure problems raised in these pieces have only intensified in the intervening years.

Come Wednesday, we’ll see what Biden plans to do about them.