An American Crisis: The United States’ Crumbling Infrastructure

By Frank Geng

Frank Geng is a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania and an associate editor of the Penn Undergraduate Law Journal.

This November, the House of Representatives approved a $325 billion transportation package meant to improve the state of the nation’s highways and infrastructure. [1] The bill comes several months after the Senate had passed a similar piece of legislation in July. [2] After continued funding deliberations, Congress could potentially approve a six-year transportation program. This bill, however, would still not provide adequate funding to improve the U.S.’s crumbling infrastructure.

In 2013, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the nation’s highways and bridges a “C+” and its transit systems a “D.” [3] The U.S. Department of Transportation seems to corroborate these evaluations, estimating that at least 10% of the country’s bridges are “structurally deficient.” [4] The World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report ranked U.S. infrastructure nineteenth in the world. [5] What are we doing wrong?

Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said in September that the U.S. government needs to spend at least $400 billion over the next six years if it wishes to maintain the current transportation system—and to improve the system would take at least another $78 billion. [6] Therefore, the funds allotted by the bill passed in early November fall short by at least $75 billion if the government wants to maintain the current level of infrastructure—which, given the poor state of the infrastructure currently, should not be the goal.

Why, then, has infrastructure spending been so low even as the government has paid such diligent attention to the economy as the U.S. continues to bounce back from the 2008 recession? When it comes to infrastructure spending, the problem is not with the federal government or with Congress, but with state and local governments. The amounts spent by state governments versus the federal government in the public sector as recorded by the U.S. Census Bureau in September 2015 reveal that more than 90% of all public sector spending (e.g. schools, highways, large construction projects) comes from the state level. [7] Over the past few years, state spending been increasing, growing 4.3% in 2013 and 3.8% in 2014. [8]

The issue, however, is that this increased state spending is not focused on infrastructure. State governments are spending more because they are paying off debt. Before the financial crisis, the states borrowed substantial amounts in the capital markets. Thus, after the crisis, they now find themselves focusing their fiscal expenditures on paying pensions and benefits and issuing fewer municipal bonds.

However, state governments do receive funding from the Highway Trust Fund, a federal transportation fund that allocates money for state infrastructure spending. The HTF receives its own funding from gas tax revenue, currently at 18.4 cents per gallon of gasoline and 24.4 cents per gallon of diesel fuel. [9] Every so often, however, the HTF’s funds start to suffer from decline—the most recent incident was at the end of October this year. [10] The drop in funding was in part due to the unwillingness of Congress to raise the gas tax for fear of public backlash. The solution, however, would not be to simply raise the gas tax--which hasn’t increased since 1993--but to tie the tax to the rate of inflation. This way, the tax would at least be able to keep up with the increase in price indexes and maintain a steady level of revenue instead of decreasing each year.

The issue of fixing America’s roads and infrastructure can only be solved by a shift in legislative priorities. Changes in modes and statistics of transportation, such as fewer people driving, and those that do drive having access to more fuel-efficient vehicles, will make reliance on the gas tax less feasible. It is imperative that Congress recognizes the importance of history in designing present solutions for the future benefit of America; the legislators should think back to the 1950s where infrastructure spending as a share of federal spending grew from 2.6% to almost 6% over the course of a decade. [11] Policymakers need to understand that the current legislation is not nearly sufficient in its address the problem of America’s infrastructure.


[1] Editorial Board. “Inadequate Transportation Bills in Congress”. New York Times. November 17, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/17/opinion/inadequate-transportation-bills-in-congress.html.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Infrastructure Report Card. American Society of Civil Engineers. 2013. http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/.
[4] Ibid.
[5] The Global Competitiveness Report 2013-2014. World Economic Forum. 2014. http://www.weforum.org/reports/global-competitiveness-report-2013-2014.
[6] Editorial Board. “Inadequate Transportation Bills in Congress”. New York Times. November 17, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/17/opinion/inadequate-transportation-bills-in-congress.html.
[7] Construction Spending. U.S. Census Bureau. September, 2015. https://www.census.gov/construction/c30/c30index.html.
[8] Fiscal 50: State Trends and Analysis. Pew Charitable Trusts. November 11, 2015. http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/collections/2014/05/19/fiscal-50-state-trends-and-analysis.
[9] Doerer, Kristen. “The Highway Trust Fund keeps bridges from falling down, but will Congress reauthorize it?”. PBS Newshour. October 27, 2015. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/highway-trust-fund-keeps-bridges-falling-will-congress-pay-bill/.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Gray, Gordon. “Trends in Federal Infrastructure Spending”. American Action Forum. June 4, 2015. http://americanactionforum.org/research/trends-in-federal-infrastructure-spending.

Photo Credit: Flickr User  Washington State Debt of Transportation

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