EDITORIAL: The Bipartisan Infrastructure Mess

...Call us bipartisan, but when Trump, Pelosi, and Schumer all agree to spend $2 trillion — without quite deciding what they’re going to spend it on or where the money’s coming from — we start to hear from our inner Patrick Henry.

...You can tell this is backward by the fact that the triumvirate has settled on a price tag — an incomprehensibly large one — but is remarkably fuzzy on what’s to be bought with that $2 trillion. Imagine taking your car to the mechanic and hearing, “That’ll be $10,000” — without ever being told what’s actually being repaired. You might begin to suspect that something is not entirely on the up-and-up.

We have been here before, with Barack Obama and his “shovel-ready” projects. The lesson of Obama’s failed stimulus bill — which was in considerable part an infrastructure program — is that doing things backwards does not work. Appropriations first, projects second, is as backwards as it can be...
We note that figuring out how to pay for this is at the bottom of the current agenda. To the extent that it’s being talked about at all, there already is fundamental and probably unbridgeable disagreement: Some of the Democrats want to undo the 2017 tax cuts, others want to raise the federal gasoline tax. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D., Md.) insisted: “It is up to President Trump to work with us by identifying new revenue to support that investment.” But revenue bills originate in the House of Representatives, not in the Oval Office.

READ ENTIRE EDITORIAL 

It will be interesting to see how much of this will be rewarded to Interior and the Forest Service for the "backlog" in maintenance projects. We should also be wary of any other federal land chicanery that could be inserted in this bill.