President Donald Trump offered few new details of his infrastructure plan during a speech Wednesday afternoon in Cincinnati, though he did promise that "everything about it is going to be right."
That may include how support for the proposal lines up on Capitol Hill. After Trump's remarks, lawmakers on the left immediately panned his plans to potentially put the future of the country's public roads into private hands.
"Once again, we have another disappointment in the Trump administration. Not only are they not putting serious dollars into infrastructure, they're actually going to do it by selling off to private individuals and private companies on Wall Street the ability to supposedly create this infrastructure investment and these jobs," Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., said on a conference call hosted by the progressive Millions of Jobs Coalition. "The problem is, in places like Wisconsin, for the vast majority of our state, we're not going to see a dime, because it's not a profitable enterprise."
Toward the end of Trump's speech – delivered in the midst of the administration's "infrastructure week" push and only days after he discussed plans to privatize air traffic control – he called on "Democrats and Republicans to join together, if that's possible." But he also vented that Democrats have "really been obstructionists" during his first few months in the White House.
"They've tried every single thing. On health care, I won't get one vote," Trump said, alluding to the administration's attempts to get a bill overhauling the Affordable Care Act through Congress. "They're just obstructionists. Every single thing is obstruction."
That's not looking like it will change in the near future with respect to infrastructure, as a cadre of Democratically aligned lawmakers have been less than receptive to Trump's push to generate $1 trillion in public and private infrastructure investment.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., described Trump's infrastructure plans as "just a private money-making operation for the big-business buddies of the president" during Wednesday's conference call. And Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., tweeted that it amounts to "a huge giveaway to Wall Street that will fail to modernize our crumbling infrastructure."
Trump's infrastructure plan was first announced on the campaign trail and is driven primarily by the theory that dolling out significant tax credits to private builders will incentivize them to do some heavy infrastructure lifting without overly burdening the federal government.
Some analysts have questioned the efficacy of the plan should it make it into legislation and be signed into law. But Trump made clear Wednesday that "we will never have outside forces telling us what to do and how to do it."
"I heard the pleas from the voters who wanted to know why we could rebuild foreign countries – a big thing, we build in foreign countries, we spend trillions and trillions of dollars outside of our nation – but we can't build a road, a highway, a tunnel, a road in our own nation," Trump said. "We don't ever seem to have the money. It's got to change, folks. There's something wrong."
The president's speech – delivered on the banks of the Ohio River – focused heavily on the revitalization of the nation's internal waterways. Earlier this year, the American Society of Civil Engineers estimated $37 billion would be needed to get the country's waterways and marine ports up to snuff – a total that pales in comparison to the $4.6 trillion in total infrastructure investment the ASCE believes is necessary to truly improve the country's inner workings.
Though Trump's $1 trillion proposal would drum up less than a quarter of that estimated cost, the president also vowed to streamline the infrastructure-approval process and peel back government regulation from the construction sector, thereby providing more immediate fixes to certain infrastructure problems.
"America built the Golden Gate Bridge in just four years and the Hoover Dam in five years. It should not take 10 years to get approvals for a very small little piece of infrastructure, and it won't," Trump said. "Our plan will help states and local governments prioritize their most pressing infrastructure needs, building transformative projects that create a flood of wealth and opportunity to benefit every part of our country, especially rural America."
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