Government watchdog: States like Illinois must be more accountable for infrastructure maintenance
Watchdog.org discusses the effect of the Trump Administration’s infrastructure plan and cites Marc Scribner’s work:
Any federal infrastructure funding plan needs to hold states like Illinois more accountable for maintenance, something that hasn’t happened in the past, according to the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
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CEI Senior Fellow Marc Scribner said the program would offer streamlined permit approvals and allow for more private activity bonds, but Scribner said the federal government too often incentivizes bad behavior from states and local governments.
“The federal government’s main sin is that they incentivize bad behavior on the part of the states,” Scribner said. “They incentivize states and locals to gold plate infrastructure projects without coming up with ways to actually maintain them.”
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But Scribner said the media has overblown infrastructure problems.
“But where [problems] do exist, they are almost entirely the result of the failure to do routine maintenance,” Scribner said, “and that is entirely a state and local decision.”
One thing that could help make state and local tax dollars go further, Scribner said, is addressing things like prevailing wage and sourcing requirements.
“There are all sorts of federal requirements that needlessly increase state costs,” Scribner said, “and that’s something that really, the labor and buy America certainly, weren’t addressed in a positive way in [Trump’s] plan.
