WASHINGTON
— As a candidate, President Trump billed himself as a new breed of
think-big Republican, pitching a $1 trillion campaign pledge to
reconstruct the nation’s roadways, waterworks and bridges — along with a
promise to revive the lost art of the bipartisan deal.
In
the White House, Mr. Trump has continued to dangle the possibility of
“a great national infrastructure program” that would create “millions”
of new jobs as part of a public-private partnership to rival the public
works achievements of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Dwight D.
Eisenhower. He chastises anyone who forgets to include it near the top
of his to-do list, telling one recent visitor to the Oval Office, “Don’t
forget about infrastructure!”
But
an ambitious public works plan, arguably his best chance of rising
above the partisan rancor of his first six months in office, is fast
becoming an afterthought — at precisely the moment Mr. Trump needs a
big, unifying issue to rewrite the narrative of his chaotic
administration.
Infrastructure
remains stuck near the rear of the legislative line, according to two
dozen administration officials, legislators and labor leaders involved
in coming up with a concrete proposal. It awaits the resolution of tough
negotiations over the budget, the debt ceiling,
a tax overhaul, a new push to toughen immigration laws — and the
enervating slog to enact a replacement for the Affordable Care Act.
Mr.
Trump’s team has yet to produce the detailed plan he has promised to
deliver “very soon,” and the president has yet to even name any members
to a new board he claimed would green-light big projects.
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The collapse of his health care overhaul
effort seemed to clear one item out of the way. But it also raised
serious doubts about the ability of Republicans to pass anything other
than regulatory rollbacks or routine spending bills.
“The
president would have been better off beginning his agenda with a major
infrastructure package,” said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of
Maine, who has been working with the White House on the issue.
“It
would give him a win on an important agenda item for him,” Ms. Collins
said. “It would have been better received by Democrats, Congress and,
frankly, citizens across the country.”
Senator
John Thune, the South Dakota Republican leading infrastructure efforts
in the Senate, said consideration of a proposal could slip into 2018.
“They’re supposedly going to submit some sort of plan in the fall, so
we’ll see,” Mr. Thune told reporters this month. “We’re sort of waiting
on the administration to tell us what it is exactly they want to do.”
Unlike
the transformative 20th-century efforts the president likes to cite at
his rallies, any plan that eventually emerges will not rely exclusively
on federal funds. Instead, it will try to use $200 billion in federal
spending to attract an additional $800 billion in investment from
private investors and local governments over the next 10 years.
Its
hybrid nature is its greatest virtue. It’s also a drawback. Democrats
and centrist Republicans remain skeptical of its limited scope. House
conservatives remain hostile toward any big, new federal funding
program. As a result, Mr. Trump’s top advisers and Republicans on the
Hill are uncertain on how to proceed and unsure what is even possible
given the party divisions exposed by the Obamacare repeal effort.
Gary
D. Cohn, chairman of Mr. Trump’s National Economic Council, along with
the president’s legislative affairs director, Marc Short, banked on one
possible political workaround: linking the plan to the administration’s
push for a tax overhaul. The approach appealed to Mr. Trump.
“Infrastructure
is in my opinion very popular,” the president said in April. “It’s
going to be bipartisan. And I’m going to use it in another bill. That’s
an important bill.”
To
get it done, Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohn, a lifelong Democrat and a
political novice, are open to increasing the federal share well beyond
$200 billion, according to officials.
Despite
his public swagger, Mr. Cohn tends to tread gingerly on sensitive
political matters and is reluctant to release details of the
administration’s infrastructure proposal, or even a legislative
strategy, for fear of having it shot down.
“Right
now, it doesn’t appear that they have a plan,” said Richard L. Trumka,
president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., who is pushing for more federal
spending. “The president doesn’t know what his own party wants, and he’s
not sure what he wants. He can’t get his own party to pony up the money
for infrastructure.”
A
White House spokeswoman, Natalie Strom, said the timetable for
releasing a proposal was the same as it had always been: late summer or
early fall. Mr. Cohn’s team is carefully weighing options and seeking
advice from dozens of financial experts, construction executives,
legislators and local officials, she said.
“Our
work on infrastructure is continuing to move as planned,” Ms. Strom
wrote in an email this past week. “Rebuilding our nation’s
infrastructure has always been a major priority for the president and
his team remains on track to do that.”
Mr.
Trump plans to name members of the infrastructure panel in the coming
weeks. But contrary to what he told The Wall Street Journal this year,
the committee won’t have the authority to approve or reject projects,
according to an administration official. Instead it will serve in a
broader advisory capacity.
“We
are working with local governments, federal agencies and our partners
on the Hill to finalize a common-sense plan that will receive
overwhelming public support and bipartisan majorities in Congress,” Mr.
Short said when asked about the status of the plan.
But
time may be running out, and Mr. Short has privately expressed
frustration that the president’s team hasn’t made infrastructure more of
a priority, according to a Senate staff member who has spoken with him.
Senate
Democrats are increasingly unwilling to work with Mr. Trump on
anything. Nor is there consensus among Republicans on how to proceed.
Senator Mitch McConnell,
the majority leader, is skeptical of wedding a tax overhaul and
infrastructure — or of any deal that would require him to compromise
with Democrats. He has suggested a more modest Republicans-only package.
He has also discussed tacking something smaller onto a budget
reconciliation bill that requires only 51 Republican votes, according to
a person close to the talks.
The
idea of an all-in-one bill combining tax reform and infrastructure also
has internal skeptics. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin shot it down
at a meeting with House members recently, arguing that a combined tax
and infrastructure bill was “too big to pass,” according to notes taken
by an attendee.
One
senior administration aide said Mr. Mnuchin’s position had prompted Mr.
Cohn to consider scrapping the idea of melding the two initiatives
altogether.
There are other impediments.
Mick
Mulvaney, Mr. Trump’s budget director, has told associates he opposes
any significant expansion of funding in the plan, according to people
close to him. Mr. Mulvaney, who led efforts to shut down the government
as a congressman from South Carolina, included a 13 percent cut to the
Department of Transportation and reductions to other
infrastructure-related programs in his draft budget for the coming
fiscal year.
Mr.
Cohn, according to two people who have spoken with him recently, has
dismissed Mr. Mulvaney’s budget as a “total nonstarter” that no one
should take seriously. And while Mr. Mulvaney remains influential with
Hill conservatives, Mr. Cohn has the president’s trust. Transportation
Secretary Elaine Chao recently called him “the big dog” on taxes and
infrastructure.
So
far he hasn’t growled. A White House official directly involved in the
process said Mr. Cohn’s team was hashing out a “declaration of
legislative principles” but would most likely leave much of the bill
drafting to House and Senate Republicans.
Still,
the broad outlines are slowly coming into focus. The plan would include
“massive permit reform” to cut approval times on major projects to two
years or less, from 10; loans and grants to improve rural
infrastructure; and funding for “transformative projects,” like
broadband and power grid improvements. In addition, the effort would
include bolstering existing programs funded through the Finance and
Innovation Act and new “incentives” to encourage states and localities
to bankroll their own projects, officials said.
For
his part, Mr. Trump is most concerned about being able to tell voters
his plan hit the $1 trillion mark — raising concerns that the
administration will simply include previously scheduled local projects
in its overall tally to claim victory.
The
president — echoing his ill-received remarks about repealing the
Affordable Care Act — has told people around him that he did not expect
the process to be this difficult, according to one longtime adviser.
The
one thing that is not in dispute is the monumental need to do
something. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that $4.6
trillion is needed to fix crumbling highways, bridges, transit systems
and waterworks, and to build out the nation’s power grid and broadband
networks.
Tom
Naratil, the Americas president for UBS and an advocate of
public-private partnerships, said: “From our investor surveys, and in
other places, you can see that infrastructure is a unifying, not a
dividing, issue. The demand is there.”
But
lawmakers from states with rural populations are concerned that local
governments will have to collect tolls or raise fees to bankroll
projects that are not profitable enough to attract big investors. “My
concern is, that works very well for large urban states, but it’s not
really feasible for rural states like Maine, where you simply can’t
generate the same kind of revenue,” Senator Collins said.
Many
members of Mr. McConnell’s conference, including conservative stalwarts
like Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, have privately pushed for
more federal money.
Sean
McGarvey, president of the North America’s Building Trades Union, said
he thought the administration needed to make “a very, very sizable
public investment” for the plan to succeed. Mr. McGarvey, one of the few
labor leaders close to the White House, said his union would like to
see “a detailed proposal that can make it through committee, and be
voted on through regular order by the end of the year.”
In
the absence of a concrete proposal to sell, Mr. Trump’s staff has
focused on what it can control — cutting regulations and harvesting
“low-hanging fruit” to show some progress, in the words of one
administration official.
But
even that hasn’t gone according to plan. A big-splash proposal to
privatize the nation’s air traffic control system, borrowed from House
Republicans, has faced tougher-than-expected opposition.
During
a White House “infrastructure week” in June that was overshadowed by
the testimony of James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, on Capitol
Hill, aides raided the Republican policy cupboard for news-release-ready
projects. Mr. Trump ended the week with what seemed like a genuinely
new, if modest, proposal: a plan to create a council to streamline
federal permitting coupled with an online “dashboard” to track federal
projects.
One
problem. A similar law was passed in 2015. The two senators who
introduced the legislation — Senator Claire McCaskill, a Missouri
Democrat, and Senator Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican — felt blindsided.
“It’s
hard when you work in a bipartisan way to accomplish something
meaningful and then the president announces it as if it was new, like it
was something he was creating,” Ms. McCaskill said.
But Mr. Trump needed something substantive to prove he was making progress, according to White House aides.
Someone
simply forgot to give the two senators a heads-up — and the president
veered off script to make the project seem as if it were his idea.
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