Trump's $1 trillion plan inspires 'Hunger Games' angst
The president's long-awaited infrastructure package will expect cities and states to pick up much more of the costs for their projects.
By LAUREN GARDNER 01/28/2018 06:49 AM EST
President Donald Trump won the White House promising a $1 trillion, 10-year blueprint to rebuild America — an initiative he said would create millions of jobs while making the nation’s highways, bridges, railroad and airports “second to none.”
But the infrastructure plan he's poised to pitch in Tuesday’s State of the Union is already drawing comparisons to the “Hunger Games.”
Instead of the grand, New Deal-style public works program that Trump's eye-popping price tag implies, Democratic lawmakers and mayors fear the plan would set up a vicious, zero-sum scramble for a relatively meager amount of federal cash — while forcing cities and states to scrounge up more of their own money, bringing a surge of privately financed toll roads, and shredding regulations in the name of building projects faster.
The federal share of the decade-long program would be $200 billion, a sum Trump himself concedes is "not a large amount." The White House contends it would lure a far larger pool of state, local and private money off the sidelines, steering as much as $1.8 trillion to needs as diverse as highways, rural broadband service, drinking water systems and veterans’ hospitals. (Maybe even commercial spaceflight, one recently leaked draft suggests.)
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https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/28/trump-infrastructure-cities-states-373775
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