A long-awaited plan that the White House says could spur as much as $1.5 trillion worth of investment in the nation’s infrastructure made its debut on February 12, as the Trump administration released a 55-page proposal alongside the president’s FY19 budget request. But while lawmakers are expected to soon get to work in putting together their own spending plan for the 2019 fiscal year, the degree to which Congress will embrace the infrastructure plan as laid out by the White House is uncertain.
The White House plan, dubbed a “Legislative Outline for Rebuilding Infrastructure in America,” includes a variety of proposals, several of which were previewed in a summary of the plan that leaked to the press in January. These include $200 billion for direct federal grants to fund a variety of water and other infrastructure projects and an expansion of EPA’s Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (WIFIA) program. The final version of the plan released this month also issues additional proposals, such as new two-year limit on the federal environmental permitting process for infrastructure projects.
The White House plan proposes spending $100 billion on a new Infrastructure Incentives Program, with the funding divided between EPA, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the Department of Transportation. Under the plan, each agency would solicit applications for grant funds, which could cover up to 20 percent of a project’s total cost. Applications would be evaluated largely based on the degree to which a project demonstrates the availability of “new, non-federal revenue” to pay for initial construction and ongoing operations, maintenance and rehabilitation. The plan would not set aside any portion of the funding for particular types of infrastructure, though EPA has said it anticipates receiving $20 billion of the total for distribution to water infrastructure and Brownfields cleanup projects.
Other parts of the plan would reserve $50 billion for rural community grants and $20 billion for “transformative projects” that “would fundamentally transform the way infrastructure is delivered or operated.” Drinking water and clean water projects would be eligible to compete against transportation, broadband, commercial, and energy projects for this transformative project assistance. Finally, the plan would set aside $20 billion for increasing the capacity of several existing infrastructure financing programs – including WIFIA – and $10 billion for a new revolving fund to finance federal purchases of real property. In sum, the Trump administration says this $200 billion in new federal spending could generate as much as $1.5 trillion in new infrastructure investment when taking into account state and local matches and private-sector participation.
The Trump plan also suggests a number of reforms to the WIFIA program and other water infrastructure financing mechanisms. Most notably, the plan proposes to broaden WIFIA beyond only drinking water and wastewater infrastructure, by making Brownfield and Superfund cleanups and flood mitigation and navigation projects eligible for funding. The plan would also allow communities to tap WIFIA loans to support “water systems acquisitions and restructurings,” and proposes to “eliminate [a] requirement under WIFIA for borrowers to be community water systems." However, current law already allows private corporations, partnerships, trusts and state and local government entities like drinking water and wastewater systems to receive WIFIA loans.
The plan further proposes amending the Clean Water Act to allow privately owned wastewater systems to access Clean Water State Revolving Fund (SRF) loans, and to “apply identical regulatory requirements to privately owned public-purpose treatment works and publicly owned treatment works.” Finally, the plan would implement a “One Agency, One Permit” permitting framework, designating a lead federal agency to issue a single record of decision for a major infrastructure project within two years. A statement issued by EPA in conjunction with the plan’s release indicated that this would lead to the establishment of an administrative appeal process under Clean Water Act Section 401 and the elimination of EPA’s ability to veto an Army Corps section 404 permit for infrastructure projects.
With President Trump’s infrastructure plan now public, it will be up to Congress to decide which, if any, of its proposals to draft into legislative language. Lawmakers are highly unlikely to take up the entire package as is, and Republican leaders have not committed to a specific timeframe for acting on any infrastructure legislation this year.