This time, it really was Infrastructure Week. On November 15, President Joe Biden signed into law the first comprehensive infrastructure bill in a generation, including over $500 billion in new spending to upgrade broadband, roads, bridges, public transit, energy, clean drinking water, and other infrastructure systems.
While the bill is ambitious, it still misses important opportunities to modernize state and local governments. Without that focus, a large percentage of the funding in the enormous bill will inevitably be spent on the same types of projects we’ve been building for the last several decades—not the transformative projects we need.
Building those kinds of transformative infrastructure projects will require modernizing workforce development systems and procurement techniques. Unfortunately, the infrastructure bill doesn’t do enough to help state and local partners with these essential inputs. If the nation wants generational impacts, we can’t afford to overlook operational capacity.
The Brookings Institution
by Ellory Monks
November 19, 2021