Clean Water for All Blog

Reports on the infrastructure proposal indicate the administration intends to dismantle bedrock conservation laws in the name of rebuilding. The administration argues that these rollbacks are necessary to expedite these projects. This is a false choice. To allow these rollbacks is to risk losing our natural, historical and cultural heritage our nation sought to preserve in the first place.

This isn’t an infrastructure plan; it’s a cheap excuse to gut health and environmental safeguards that protect communities from dangerous, ill-conceived and poorly constructed projects.

“America is long, long overdue for smart, forward-thinking infrastructure investments, but the administration’s proposal badly misses the mark and reads more like a strategy to gut clean air, water, and wildlife protections, while silencing local voices, than a serious effort to rebuild America’s infrastructure.”

This isn’t a plan, it’s a scam to sell off our roads, bridges, and other vital infrastructure to wealthy corporations while gutting the bedrock laws that have protected our water, air, and health for decades.

We don’t have to choose between fixing our crumbling infrastructure and having clean air and water, yet Trump’s infrastructure plan is nothing more than another scam that would destroy our environment, privatize our public works, increase taxes on the middle class, and bulldoze communities’ ability to have a say in the projects happening in their own backyard. Never mind that it does nothing to prioritize communities that need the most help, move our country toward a clean energy future, or plan for a changing climate.

This is a bill designed to eliminate environmental protections and fork over billions in taxpayer dollars to big corporations that has been dressed up as an ‘infrastructure proposal’ to trick the public. This is not a serious proposal to make the investments America’s infrastructure needs — this is a scam designed to gut clean air, water, and wildlife protections, transform public highways and bridges into privately owned toll roads, and sell off America’s public lands

The waiting is over and the result is painful. For a little over a year, the current administration has alluded to plans to address the nation’s infrastructure crisis. The allusions have become real and reveals contempt for people of color, poor and working-class communities, and the middle class.

Unfortunately, the infrastructure plan released this week by President Trump falls far short on all three counts. It passes the buck to states and local governments to carry the weight of investment, mentions little to assure workers that jobs created will be quality jobs, does not guarantee that projects will be required to use American products, and fails to consider the added strain climate change will put on our infrastructure in the future.