Graphic by Scott Hilling/ENR Art Dept.
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As construction looks ahead to a new Trump administration, some in the industry are concerned about whether the President-elect will seek to “claw back,” or rescind, enacted but unspent funding from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Both measures contain massive amounts of infrastructure funding.
There has been no such claw back even attempted for those measures, although in a speech in September Trump warned he would make an unspecified cut in the IRA.
A senior industry official says that such a cut in the IIJA would be exceedingly unlikely to happen for a couple of reasons.
Brian Turmail, Associated General Contractors of America vice president of public affairs and workforce, says, “The only parts of the infrastructure act that could even be ‘clawed back’ are the parts that were subject to future appropriations.”
Turmail added in an emailed statement that category of programs included about $30 billion for rail projects and $17 billion for transit—“at least those were the amounts when the bill was enacted. They are likely significantly lower now.”
In addition, he says, “Given the bipartisan levels of support for infrastructure—including rail and transit projects—it is hard to see reneging on the promises in the bipartisan infrastructure bill getting much traction.”
Turmail also says, “Killing construction jobs after an election where the winner was elected thanks in large part to votes from people who do construction just doesn’t seem very likely.”
He says, “Some [AGC] members are worried, but when we explain the political difficulty of clawing back those funds they tend to come away feeling less worried.”
The 2021 IIJA legislation’s estimated total funding is $1.2 trillion. The U.S. Dept. of Transportation estimated in September that to that point, more than $480 billion had been announced for over 60,000 projects in DOT’s part of the legislation.
But Ben Brubeck, Associated Builders and Contractors vice president of regulatory, labor and state affairs, says that about 60% of IIJA’s total funding “has not hit the street yet.”
Trump said in a Sept. 5, speech in New York City that he will “rescind all unspent funds under the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.”
But Turmail says, “Clawing back the IRA funds would require some kind of repeal of the measure or portions of it. Politically that would be pretty challenging considering the wide geographic dispersal of the projects being funded.”
Tom Ichniowski has been writing about the federal government as ENR’s Washington Bureau Chief since the George H.W. Bush administration, and he has covered at least five major highway bills. A recognized expert on government policy on infrastructure and regulation, Tom is also a Baltimore native and Orioles fan who grew up rooting for Brooks and Frank Robinson. He is a graduate of Columbia College and Columbia’s graduate school of journalism, where he once used “unrelentless” in a headline.
