The Downside of Federal Infrastructure Spending

My Washington Post op-ed on federal infrastructure yesterday elicited a large and vigorous response. The comments on the WaPo site and emails to my inbox were about 80 percent in opposition to my views.

Here are some critiques of my article and my responses:

Critique: My view of devolving infrastructure funding to the states is unrealistic because only the federal government has enough “resources” to do big projects.

Response: The federal government has no magical source of money. All “federal dollars” ultimately come from taxpayers who live in the 50 states. It is true that the federal government can run larger deficits that state governments, but that’s a reason not to give the Feds responsibility for spending activities because they tend to go hog wild.

Critique: Maybe the federal government screws up, but so do state governments and private companies.

Response: Of course. But as the op-ed noted, when the Feds screw-up they botch it for the entire country, often for many decades. The federal government is a monopoly, and monopolies breed inefficiency. By contrast, the states compete with each other and learn from each other to an extent. And when private companies screw up repeatedly, they go belly up.

Critique: Maybe the federal government screws up, but we should just try to make it work better.

Response: The histories of the Corps and Reclamation illustrate patterns of failure for more than a century. And we’ve explored similar patterns with other federal agencies at www.downsizinggovernment.org. Federal problems are often deep-rooted and systematic, and they defy the many well-meaning efforts at reform, such as Al Gore’s “reinventing government” initiative in the 1990s. So it’s time to try something different—like exploring privatization.

Critique: We need the federal government for things like the Interstate Highway System because infrastructure crosses state lines.

Response: Numerous people made this point regarding my op-ed, but I’m afraid they didn’t put their thinking caps on. Private energy pipelines cross state and international borders, and so do the huge systems of the private freight railroads, such as Union Pacific.

Critique: Federal agencies, such as the Corps, often contract-out work to private companies that do the actual construction, so failures like Hurricane Katrina are private failures.

Response: Hurricane Katrina represented a failure of government on many levels, as I’ll address in an upcoming essay on the Corps. The American Society of Civil Engineers concluded that “a large portion of the destruction from Hurricane Katrina was caused by …engineering and engineering-related policy failures.” So that’s the fault of the Corps, not private contractors.

Anyway, the volume of negative, snarky, and knee-jerk responses to my suggesting that the federal government doesn’t work very well is rather depressing. I criticized Rachel Maddow for “thinking big” about federal spending. But the nation is going to have to “think big” about government reforms to avert the looming federal fiscal disaster. Devolution and privatization offer part of the solution both to reduce debt and to revive U.S. economic growth in coming years.