Trump plans to shift infrastructure funding to cities, states, business
President WASHINGTON — Donald Trump will lay out a vision this coming week for sharply curtailing the federal government’s funding of the nation’s infrastructure and calling upon states, cities and corporations to shoulder most of the cost of rebuilding roads, bridges, railways and waterways.
He will also endorse a plan to privatize and modernize the nation’s air-traffic control system. That plan, which is to be introduced Monday at the White House and the subject of a major speech in the Midwest two days later, will be Trump’s first concrete explanation of how he intends to fulfill a campaign promise to lead $1 trillion in U.S. infrastructure projects.
The goal is to create millions of jobs while doing much-needed reconstruction and updating. But the actual details of the initiative are unsettled, and a more intricate blueprint is still weeks or even months from completion.
What the president will offer instead over the coming days, his advisers said, are the contours of a plan. The federal government would make only a fractional down payment on rebuilding the nation’s aging infrastructure. Trump would rely on a combination of private industry, state and city tax money, and borrowed cash to finance the rest.
It would be a stark departure from ambitious infrastructure programs of the past, in which the government played a major role and devoted substantial resources to paying the cost of largescale projects.
“We like the template of not using taxpayer dollars to give taxpayers wins,” said Gary Cohn, director of the National Economic Council and an architect of the infrastructure plan, in an interview Friday in his West Wing office.
“We want to be in the partnership business,” Cohn said. “We want to be in the facilitation business, and we’re willing to provide capital wherever necessary to help certain infrastructure along.”
As a model for the approach, Trump plans on Monday to send a proposal to Congress for overhauling the nation’s air-traffic control system. He would spin it off into a private, nonprofit corporation that would use digital satellite-based tracking systems, rather than land-based radar, to guide flights in the United States. There would be no cost to the government, Cohn said, because a newly formed corporation would finance the entire enterprise, using loans to handle the initial costs of equipment and other needs.
On Wednesday, Cohn said, the president will travel to the banks of the Ohio River to deliver a speech about overhauling the nation’s infrastructure, including the inland waterways that are in dire need of attention.
The philosophy undergirding the speech, administration officials said, is that melding public and private forces to rebuild the nation’s physical backbone will vastly expand the resources available to pay for doing it. The concept — a discussion of which helped cement Cohn’s hiring by Trump late last year — has driven infrastructure policy in the United States for many years. But Trump is proposing a far smaller federal investment than many Republicans and Democrats have long thought is necessary.
Trump is “trying to figure out, How do I get the most infrastructure improvements for the American citizens in the quickest fashion I can with the best return on investment for the U.S. taxpayers?” said Cohn, a former Goldman Sachs executive. “It’s sort of a businessman’s model.”
The White House has said Cohn will recuse himself from matters pertaining to Goldman, but it is unclear how that decision will affect any future plans by the company to bid for government partnerships in infrastructure. The White House noted on Saturday that the proposed air-traffic control corporation would be governed by independent directors with a fiduciary duty to the new entity.
On Thursday, Trump will hold listening sessions at the White House with a group of mayors and governors. On Friday, he plans to cap off what members of the administration are calling “infrastructure week” with a visit to the Transportation Department, where he will discuss drastically reducing the time it takes to obtain federal permits for projects.
Despite the public push to promote the infrastructure package, Cohn acknowledged that the White House did not have a detailed proposal ready to release. He said, for example, that no decision had been made on whether the infrastructure plan would ultimately be married to a tax measure. Republicans and Democrats tried such a step during the Obama administration, in a plan that would have used revenue from repatriating corporate profits parked overseas to finance projects to improve roads, bridges, waterways, broadband and other areas.
“It’s undetermined yet,” Cohn said. “It may come before. It may come during. It may come after.”
Southern MACON, GA. — rocker Gregg Allman was laid to rest Saturday near his older brother Duane in the same cemetery where they used to write songs among the tombstones, not far from U.S. Highway 41, the road immortalized in the Allman Brothers Band’s 1973 hit “Ramblin’ Man.”
Thousands of fans lined the streets of Macon to honor Allman, whose casket was carried into Rose Hill Cemetery as a bagpiper played a somber tune. Family and friends, including musicians who played in The Allman Brothers Band over the years, gathered next to his grave and on a nearby hillside shaded by huge oak trees. Toward the end, a freight train rolled in and stopped alongside the cemetery, reminding some mourners of Allman’s lyrics to another hit, “Melissa.”
Along the funeral route, many shared memories of concerts, and some blared the band’s songs from their cars and trucks. One carried a sign saying “You made our soul shine. We’ll miss you brother Gregg.”
“I wouldn’t have missed this if I lived in China,” said Kelli Jo Hickman, who drove from Murphy, N.C. She said her mom, Dixie, introduced her to the band in the 1970s, and she’s listened to their music ever since.
The funeral service was private, with room for only about 100 people inside the small chapel. Allman’s ex-wife Cher and his band mates, including the drummer Jaimoe and guitarist Dickey Betts, who wrote and sang “Ramblin Man,” also attended.
Some slipped into the chapel through a back entrance. Former President Jimmy Carter had said he would attend, honoring the keyboardist who drew large crowds to events during his 1976 presidential campaign.
Allman, who blazed a trail for many Southern rock groups, died May 27 at the age of 69 at his home near Savannah, Ga., said Michael Lehman, the rock star’s manager. He blamed liver cancer.
With Gregg at the organ and Duane playing guitar, the band began its rise to fame in Macon about five decades ago. They used to write songs while hanging out in the cemetery, Alan Paul wrote in “One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band.”
“He’s somebody who has been in my life first as an artist and later as a real person since I was about 8 years old, and so it’s shocking to think of the world without him,” said Paul, 50, who interviewed Gregg Allman many times for his book.