AASHTO Journal - AASHTO Annual Meeting: Infrastructure Driving U.S. Economy

At the 2024 American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, several speakers highlighted how infrastructure investment is helping drive U.S. economic growth.

[Above photo by AASHTO]

Mark Zandi (above), chief economist for Moody’s Analytics, noted in his keynote address at the meeting’s general session that three pieces of legislation in particular helped stave off the recessionary effect of high inflation and rising interest rates over the last three years.

“We are benefitting enormously from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), the CHIPS [and Science] Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act. They all had a substantive impact on the economy,” noted Zandi. “Prior to passage of those acts, we had about $75 billion in annualized spending on manufacturing facilities – what we used to call ‘factories’ in this country. That has grown to $235 billion in annualized spending now. Manufacturing plants are coming back into the country.”

He stressed that “significant ramp up” in infrastructure spending helped prevent the U.S. economy from going into recession despite “aggressive” interest rate increases by the Federal Reserve.

“Many economists thought we would go into recession but we did not – and what they missed is the impact of industrial policy,” Zandi said.

That is one reason why Garrett Eucalitto – commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Transportation and AASHTO’s president – characterized the IIJA as “the biggest infrastructure investment any of us ever seen” in his opening remarks and why “telling the story” about how the IIJA is “delivering impactful projects and what those projects are doing for communities” nationwide is so important.

“We need to do a better job telling those stories as we begin work on the successor [legislation] to the IIJA,” he explained. “We want to ensure the IIJA is not a ‘once in a lifetime investment’ but the baseline for building transportation funding for the future.”

Mike Carroll – secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation and the new chair of the AASHTO Committee on Transportation Communications, known as TransComm – echoed Eucalitto’s comments during his remarks during the meeting’s general session.

“Nothing is more important than reauthorizing the IIJA – nothing is more critical,” he said. “We fully recognize that there are nuances [in funding legislation] reflecting the different perspectives of the states, but it is incumbent on all of us to get Congress to reauthorize the IIJA and we will figure out the nuances later. I dread the prospect of a reversal of the revenue we all get from that bill.”

Polly Trottenberg, deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Transportation, also emphasized that “our collective goal” among federal and state modal officials is to look back at the end of the five-year term of the IIJA and show how it served the traveling public and the nation’s economy.

“We need to show communities on ground how investments from the IIJA benefitted them,” she pointed out. “We need to always drive home how those investments have improved the daily lives of Americans – and how it will impact the lives of generations of Americans to come.”