You could almost see the eyes rolling last week as Senators John Kerry and Kay Bailey Hutchison introduced the latest version of a bill to create a National Infrastructure Bank. After all, President Barack Obama calls for an infrastructure bank in every budget, and bills have been in play every session since 2007.
Today we live in an age of austerity. How does yet another government institution fit into this picture?
As a small business owner who helps people think through infrastructure issues, I’m struck by the extraordinary opportunity here. We’re all aware of the need: A national infrastructure bank that uses federal borrowing authority to leverage private investment for roads, bridges, water systems and power grids is the only way for the U.S. to increase infrastructure investments in tight fiscal times.
And the technical opportunity is irrefutable. Why not raise money for infrastructure at a time of historically low borrowing costs? What’s more, every major economy in the world has an infrastructure bank, so we should have one, too. Need is not the issue.
Opportunity is. We need a model for smart government. Forget the weirdly inefficient, old-style European model.
Re-engineering an old public sector is nearly impossible, and no one has the patience for it anyway. Think about a national infrastructure bank as an exercise in creating smart government, in an area that is strategically important for the future of our country.
Doubling Annual Investment
A high-functioning infrastructure bank would have three characteristics, shaping its overall role of doubling our annual investment in infrastructure, from $150 billion a year to $300 billion.
First, the role of the infrastructure bank is catalytic rather than managerial. Rather than creating a large bureaucracy, the bank would assemble a corps of focused professionals: engineers, financiers, economists and what I term strategic leaders — people who get things done, driven by a vision to make this country more competitive.
Their job will be to set projects in motion, then to make sure that those projects meet or exceed guidelines. Monitor, not manage; act strategically, not operationally. Move fast, don’t get bogged down, get the job done.
The result will be an elite, rapid, infinitely smaller and infinitely more qualified leadership team than what we have today, an instructive model for other infrastructure related agencies at every level of government.
Energize Private Sector
Second, the function of the infrastructure bank is to guide and energize the private sector. An infrastructure bank goes into the guts of the process — project selection — and gets at the frightening issue of cost. Our costs are often twice that of our European brothers for urban mass transit projects, 10 times those of China.
The bank’s day-to-day business will be to invest in ventures and networks of ventures that serve for 20, 30, 40 even 50 years, providing a competitive return throughout that period. In this sense the bank will be a welcome, violent change agent, smashing open three areas in the infrastructure project-creation process that are costing this country a fortune:
— It takes more than 10 years on average for a project to move through the approval process, a period that would need to be reduced to three years for projects to be bankable.
— At least 50 percent of large U.S. projects suffer cost overruns in the 30 percent-or-greater range. This would be eliminated through bank leadership.
— The selection of projects tends to be willy-nilly, based on political interests. A bank ideally would be a model of focus, restricting its attention to projects that generate competitiveness.
Results Oriented
Lastly, the infrastructure bank will be results oriented and transparent: your bank, investing in your public assets. The bank will be a great experiment in the Facebook Age, bringing in funds from all over the world to build our strategic infrastructure.
The very nature of the smart-government model is to set goals and report performance. This new institution will go beyond that, creating knowledge, developing metrics and pioneering ways of communicating: from project approvals, to performance reporting to championing new technology.
Maybe the Kerry/Hutchison proposal is the opening salvo in a bipartisan effort to build smart government. Thinking about an American infrastructure bank in this way makes an attractive experiment that we have to explore. Creating a model in an area critical to our economic future is a strategic option we can’t ignore.
Recognizing that the bank would double our infrastructure investment and increase the efficiency of each dollar spent is a good deal for every citizen.
This piece is cross-posted at Bloomberg Government
