The American infrastructure gap is the accumulated cost of decades of underinvestment. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is a significant step toward addressing it that will not, by itself, close it.
The Gap's Dimensions
The American infrastructure gap — the difference between the infrastructure condition and capacity that the American economy requires and what exists — is documented in the regular assessments of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Congressional Budget Office, and various federal agencies, and consistently shows significant deficits in transportation infrastructure, water and wastewater systems, energy grid resilience, and the digital infrastructure on which the modern economy increasingly depends. The gap reflects the accumulated effect of underinvestment across decades in which the political incentives for infrastructure investment — ribbon-cuttings, ribbon-cuttings in a political environment that prioritises visible new construction over less-visible maintenance — systematically produced new construction while deferring maintenance of existing infrastructure.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 — the largest federal infrastructure investment in decades — represents a genuine and significant commitment to closing the gap in specific categories: roads and bridges, passenger rail, broadband, water systems, and electric vehicle charging. Its scale is significant relative to the prior decade's infrastructure investment and modest relative to the accumulated gap. It addresses the most politically visible and technically straightforward infrastructure deficits while leaving some of the most consequential — the energy grid's resilience to extreme weather events, the water infrastructure of smaller municipalities, the deferred maintenance backlog on federally owned infrastructure — less fully addressed.
The Infrastructure Act is the most significant federal infrastructure investment in a generation. It is also insufficient to close a gap that accumulated over decades of underinvestment. The governance question is whether the institutional conditions that produced the underinvestment — the political economy that consistently defers maintenance in favour of new construction — have changed enough to prevent the next decades of underinvestment from reproducing the gap the current investment is addressing.
Discussion