Assessment of Our National Infrastructure Strategy

Our nation's physical infrastructure includes a variety of complex and interrelated systems that are critical components in providing for our quality of life and economic security. It includes the following sectors: aviation roads and bridges dams drinking and waste water energy hazardous and solid waste navigable waterways public parks and recreation rail schools security and transit. There are many challenges with this infrastructure. To illustrate the American Society of Civil Engineers recently graded the overall condition of our infrastructure as a D. This indicates a drop from a D+ four years ago. The estimated cost to repair and upgrade our infrastructure is over a trillion dollars. Given the many demands for federal resources an effective national infrastructure strategy is essential. Ideally this strategy would facilitate the funding of our most critical infrastructure requirements in an integrated fashion. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate our existing national infrastructure strategy. It will also offer recommended improvements based upon the recent experiences of the United States Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of Transportation within their respective sectors.