Infrastructure: One Thing Missing
Legislating shouldn’t be this hard. The House finally approved, and the President will sign today, the Senate’s $1.2 trillion “hard” infrastructure bill, to fix roads, rails, broadband, transmission, and other infrastructure needs. The package includes Common Good’s streamlining reforms such as two years for permitting and a 200-page limit on environmental reviews. Following publication of our 2015 report “Two Years, Not Ten Years,” we testified in hearings and worked with Senate staff on these reforms, which will save money and expedite green infrastructure.
Common Good has also called for a plan to avoid waste in implementation. The $1.2 trillion package is about $10,000 for every American household. Without implementation oversight, the money will gush out of Washington without any discipline over, for example, New York work rules that can make infrastructure projects five times as expensive as in other developed countries.
America should get its money’s worth, not waste half the money in featherbedding and other archaic procurement practices. President Biden has appointed former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu to oversee the plan. This is a step in the right direction, but he will not have authority to override wasteful practices that are imbedded in existing procedures and contracts.
We call upon Congress to create a nonpartisan National Infrastructure Board, to oversee priorities and enforce commercially reasonable contracts. This new board, comparable to base-closing commissions, could save several hundred billion dollars on this one infrastructure program alone.
Other countries such as Australia have comparable boards. Here’s our proposalon how it could work, and a short video on why it’s needed. If you agree, please urge your representatives to champion a National Infrastructure Board. Let’s build as much infrastructure as we’re paying for. Isn’t that worth a short law?
Writing in the Wall Street Journal last week, Harvard Business School Professor Ranjay Gulati warned the infrastructure bill could become a "boondoggle" without proper implementation.
On November 2, Philip Howard discussed how to bring accountability to police practices at a forum organized by the R Street Institute. Watch the video here.