Green energy and equity efforts: Where are infrastructure dollars going?
Sarah Westwood
Biden administration officials have shoveled hundreds of billions of infrastructure dollars out the door since Congress passed a bipartisan infrastructure bill in the fall of 2021.
The speed at which the administration has made money available has been staggering despite concerns about excessive government spending contributing to inflation.
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Much of the spending has gone toward projects that have little to do with filling potholes and fixing bridges, the types of images Democrats relied on when they pitched the bill to Republicans and the public.
And the massive scope of the funding, coupled with the accelerated timeline for spending down the money, has led to some concerns about a relative lack of oversight of the money.
“Our experience has always been when you have a large amount of money — and this is pretty gargantuan — there will be an element of fraud built in,” Stephen Street, president of the Association of Inspectors General, told the Pew Charitable Trusts. “It will take many forms: false documentation, being reimbursed for monies never spent, phony records.”
Justin Marlowe, a research professor at the University of Chicago, said last year when asked about the biggest concerns for local officials that the size of the infrastructure law is a problem.
“The simple answer is [local officials] trying to spend a lot of money in a period of tremendous uncertainty and on a tight timeline,” Marlowe said.
A significant chunk of the money has gone toward subsidizing green energy technology that hasn’t caught on in the market organically.
The law gave Montana, for example, $43 million to build electric vehicle charging stations across the state.
But Montana had just 1,605 electric vehicles registered throughout the state by the middle of last year, when the federal government approved the massive investment in charging stations, according to the Department of Energy.
That means the infrastructure bill will invest nearly $27,000 per car in Montana with its allocation for charging station construction.
Some states have an even greater disparity between the number of registered electric vehicles and the amount of money the Biden administration has set aside for building charging stations.
In North Dakota, just 400 electric vehicles are registered in the state, according to Pew Charitable Trusts; the infrastructure package offered North Dakota $26 million for building charging stations.
That’s a more than $57,000 investment per electric car in the state.
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The infrastructure package will pour money into fleets of electric buses as well.
For example, the package will provide more than $7.6 million for “clean” school buses in Washington, D.C., despite the city’s school district not offering bus service to most of its students.
District of Columbia Public Schools offers bus service to just 3,200 of its more than 50,000 students.
And the Washington school district has struggled in recent months to hire enough drivers to operate the few buses it already has; the district has cut bus routes and consolidated others into a smaller number of routes in order to navigate the staffing shortages.
The McCall-Donnelly School District in Idaho has roughly 1,300 students total. The district has operated nine bus routes this school year, according to the district’s website.
But the northern Idaho district will receive nearly $4 million to get 10 electric school buses through the infrastructure bill.
In all, the Biden administration has handed out $931 million just for the purchase of clean school buses.
Liberal social priorities have also seeped into the structure of many infrastructure projects.
In Portland, Oregon, for example, one of the goals of a $2.4 million pedestrian safety program is “advancing equity outcomes” and working to “address racial equity, community engagement, workforce diversity, safe communities, and resource allocation.”
An $11.3 million project in Pittsburgh, titled “New Pathways to Equity,” will focus on “green infrastructure,” among other things, focusing on revitalizing a part of the city affected by “historic disinvestment” by installing electric car chargers and sustainable stormwater catchers.
Still more funding has gone to conducting studies or building projects that were too costly or unwieldy to complete before the funding infusion.
For example, a California high-speed rail project that has famously languished for years while its budget has ballooned received at least $25 million from the infrastructure package, although the Biden administration rejected a request for more.
First approved in 2008 with a price tag of $33 billion, the Los Angeles to San Francisco high-speed route remains unfinished three years after its initial completion date, sporting an estimated cost of nearly $130 billion.
Former President Donald Trump pulled the plug on federal funding for the project in 2019, claiming the project was a mess.
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But infrastructure dollars remain difficult to track. For one, the project proposals available provide different levels of detail about where the money will go.
Those proposals don’t necessarily reflect what will ultimately happen with projects; construction delays, supply chain snags, or other unforeseen problems could alter the scope of proposals in the future.