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February 16, 2018 | NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS
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Trump’s amazing infrastructure ‘bait-and-switch’
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“Trillion” was just a marketing
slogan. Now Trump wants to sell
Bonneville Power assets
It’s the incredible shrinking in-
frastructure plan.
Candidate Donald Trump
campaigned for over a year on
a plan to spend $1 trillion on
America’s neglected infrastruc-
ture. But Trump never sent
Congress an infrastructure pro-
posal in his first year in office.
Then during his Jan. 30, 2018,
State of the Union address, he
increased the promised sum to
$1.5 trillion. Two weeks later,
the public finally got a look at
his proposal. It’s … brace for it
… at most $200 billion in fed-
eral money.
“It is time to give Americans
the working, modern infrastruc-
ture they deserve,” Trump tells
Congress in the 55-page legisla-
tive outline released Feb. 12.
What happened to the rest of
the $1 trillion, or the $1.5 tril-
lion? The Trump plan says it’s
supposed to come from other
people’s money — from state
and local governments, which
are constitutionally bound to
balance their budgets and which
“As a bridge builder, I’ve been under the bridges and I’ve seen how bad
they are,” said Lori Baumann of Laborers Local 737, above. U.S. Sen. Ron
Wyden (D-Oregon), right, invited Baumann and IBEW Local 48 Business
Manager Gary Young to speak at a Feb. 1 press conference outside the Ore-
gon Museum of Science and Industry. The event was meant to highlight
the urgent need for federal spending to fix roads, bridges and infrastruc-
ture. “If you make a speech but don’t back it up with hard dollars … we
know a scam when we see it,” Wyden said, referring to Trump’s State of the
Union announcement of a forthcoming $1.5 trillion infrastructure plan.
“You can’t make top notch infrastructure with bargain basement support.”
are already struggling to pay for
an increasing share of Medicaid
costs.
But wait, there’s more!
Trump also proposes to sell off
federal infrastructure to “state,
local, or private entities” — in-
cluding “transmission assets”
belonging to federal agencies
like the Bonneville Power Ad-
ministration (BPA). Never mind
that the Northwest enjoys the
lowest electricity rates in the na-
tion thanks to the BPA. Says the
Trump Administration: “The
vast majority of the Nation’s
electricity needs are met
through for-profit investor-
owned utilities.” Why not sell
off the remainder?
Other federal properties
Trump wants to put up for sale
include Ronald Reagan and
Dulles International Airports,
and the Washington Aqueduct,
which supplies Washington,
D.C. with fresh drinking water.
Meanwhile, most of the
money Trump actually proposes
to spend comes with strings at-
tached. Half of the new federal
money, $100 billion, would be
parceled out as incentives to lo-
cal government entities that
agree to match the funds four to
one. Another $50 billion is ear-
marked for rural block grants
for transportation, broadband,
water, waste and power, most of
which will be given to states ac-
cording to a formula based on
the miles of rural roads and the
rural population they have.
In response to the president’s
proposal, Democrats in Con-
gress are pushing their own not-
very-detailed “Better Deal”
proposal, which would commit
$1 trillion in federal money —
the amount Trump seemed to
promise voters two years ago.
— Don McIntosh