Chao: Trump’s $1t infrastructure plan to include ‘more than transportation’

U.S. Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao said the Trump administration’s planned $1 trillion infrastructure initiative would include “energy, water and potentially broadband and veterans hospitals as well,” according to a report from Reuters.    President Donald Trump’s purported $1 trillion infrastructure plan will cover far more than just transportation infrastructure, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao said at a recent event at the USDOT headquarters in Washington, D.C.
   Chao was quoted in a Reuters news report as saying the Trump administration’s planned infrastructure initiative would include “a strategic, targeted program of investment valued at $1 trillion over 10 years,” adding that the proposal will “include energy, water and potentially broadband and veterans hospitals as well.”
   To be fair, those are all valid needs for the U.S. going forward, but the news came as a bit of a surprise to shipping and logistics industry analysts, most of whom had assumed that the entirety of the president’s $1 trillion infrastructure investment plan would go towards rebuilding ailing U.S. roads and bridges, and improving port and inland infrastructure for cargo movement.
   Chao did not disclose any further details of the plan, but said it would be released later this year and would aim to accelerate the government approval process for project funding. Some analysts have questioned where exactly this funding will come from, however, as Trump has indicated previously that the vast majority will be sourced from private investment, as opposed to public tax revenues.
   The president earlier this month released a preliminary budget proposal for 2018 that would cut funding for USDOT by 13 percent from 2016 levels to $16.2 billion and eliminate President Obama’s Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) grant program, a move that was less than well received by members of the freight transportation industry. Obama launched the TIGER program in 2009 in an effort to revitalize ailing transportation infrastructure across the country.