A Florida Turnpike bridge under construction in Miami, May 2019

Donald Trump’s ultimatum and walkout from negotiations has paralyzed measures to repair America’s infrastructure.

Last Wednesday, Trump — angered that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke of a “cover-up” over White House attempts to block hearings on Trump-Russia links and Trump’s tax and financial matters — berated Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in a five-minute meeting. He then told the press in the White House Rose Garden that he would not work with the Democrats until the hearings were suspended:

Instead of walking in happily into a meeting, I walk in to look at people that have just said that I was doing a cover-up. I don’t do cover-ups….

You can go down the investigation track, and you can go down the investment track or the track of “Let’s get things done for the American people”.

TrumpWatch, Day 853: Trump’s Ultimatum — Stop Hearings or I Stop Government Business

Trump’s demand added to a running joke about White House “Infrastructure Week”, declared in June 2017, becoming “Infrastructure Week in Its 3rd Year”.

More seriously, it has highlighted the state of American bridges, roads, tunnels, and other structures. The American Society of Civil Engineers has estimated that funding needs to be increased by $2 trillion over 10 years for necessary repairs.

In April, Pelosi, Schumer, and other Democrats announced after a White House meeting that they had agreed with Trump to push the $2 trillion infrastructure package. The amount was twice what Trump had proposed in 2018.

But Republican legislators began to step back from the commitment. Grover Norquist, the head of Americans for Tax Reform, warned that any tax increase to fund infrastructure would be “fingerprints on the murder weapon” used to convict Republicans in the next election. Meanwhile, Democrats pressed the White House to give concrete ideas on funding for the project.

Trump’s walkout last week fed suspicions that the reason beyond the hearings, in the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives, was the challenge to provide the money. The Administration is already facing an unprecedented Federal debt after its $1.5 trillion tax cut package in December 2017, and its 2019-2020 budget is likely to propose sweeping cuts to many Government agencies.

Schumer said:

There were investigations going on three weeks ago when we met, and [Trump] still met with us. But now that he was forced to actually say how he would pay for it, he had to run away. And he came up with this pre-planned excuse.

Pelosi echoed, “I can only think that he wasn’t up to the task of figuring out the difficult choices of how to cover the cost of the important infrastructure legislation that we had talked about three weeks before.”

City and State officials are watching with concern. Steve Adler, the mayor of Austin, Texas, summarizes:

We’re two-and-a-half years into this with no real movement on infrastructure, no real new dollars being brought to bear.

I don’t know if it was just something that the President was saying in order to get elected, but there’s never been an indication that there was something there there.