Will Donald Trump stamp his name on the project of a lifetime, a plan to upgrade America?s crumbling infrastructure" Donald Trump?s statements seem focus-group-tested to widen the country?s partisan divide, but when it comes to infrastructure, his gruff assessment is actually middle-of-the-(crumbling)-road. "Our country is falling apart, frankly. Our infrastructure is a disaster," Trump said during a segment on the cable show Morning Joe in December 2015, a statement that would remain a refrain on the campaign trail. According to experts, this was not an example of him being hyperbolic. Many nonpartisan civil engineering groups consider the state of U.S. infrastructure a national crisis, and last year, government hit a 30-year low in national infrastructure spending.
The most recent Infrastructure Report Card from the American Society of Civil Engineers gave grades of Ds and Fs to the country?s roads, bridges, rails, pipes, ports, and power grids. Chris Ward, former executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and now senior vice president of AECOM, an American engineering firm with 95,000 employees, says it?s "a crisis, without a doubt."
"The status of our infrastructure is horrendous," he says. "There?s a butcher?s bill of projects that haven?t been funded."
By the first presidential debate last fall, Trump was saying "we?ve become a Third World country" in comparison to China and the Mid...