Trump to lay out plans for overhauling infrastructure
WASHINGTON — President Trump will lay out a vision this 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 is 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.
“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.
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 satellitebased 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 inland waterways that are in dire need of attention.
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.