Mitch Landrieu, senior advisor to President Joe Biden and former mayor of New Orleans, has been handed an unusual task by the White House: giving away $1.2 trillion from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to rebuild America's crumbling infrastructure.
As Biden's go-to infrastructure guy, Landrieu and his 15-person team have spent the better part of two years traveling the country (so far he's clocked up more than 110,000 miles and visited 128 cities, towns, counties and tribal communities) looking for ways to fix America's crumbling infrastructure and attempting to set up a system that collaborates with local communities to provide investments in roads and bridges, airports, waterways, clean air and safe water.
Before the Bell spoke with Landrieu about his current task ahead of his panel at the Bold New Consensus conference, hosted by the Economic Security Project in New York last Thursday.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Before the Bell: What has your current role taught you about the disparity of resources in the US?
Mitch Landrieu: You can have an idea of what to do, but you've got to get the 'how to do it' right, which requires intense coordination between the federal folks on the Cabinet level with the governors and the mayors and the county executives to get the money down to the ground where it matters.
You can see in the funding for the infrastructure bill that we're working hard to do all of that. Last month we gave $3.7 billion to help folks lower their heating bills ahead of winter. We're also making sure that the governors are using [federally supported water infrastructure funds] to ensure that folks actually have indoor plumbing, which some places like Lowndes County, Alabama, or Napakiak, Alaska, struggle with.
How do long-term infrastructure plans play into the reality of electoral politics and four-year term limits?
We're going fast, we want this to happen as quickly as humanly possible, but we also need to make sure communities get what works for them. The opposite of that is to go put something up wherever and don't worry about where the community is. That's why the Interstate Highway System split Black communities in half. We want to build generational wealth and do it in a way that heals communities rather than separates them. And that always takes a bit of thought.
Recession has been a buzzword for the last two years, and the Biden administration has stood as one of the lone voices saying the US economy will be fine. Now it appears that Wall Street is starting to agree. Do you feel like taking a victory lap here?
President Biden has understood, perhaps more than the brilliant economist with lots of PhDs behind their name, the simple fact that you should not have to lay people off and reduce wages if the point is to have more jobs with increased wages and to have a soft landing.
You have really prominent economists who have been predicting doom for the last two years. And look, if you go outside every day and claim it's going to rain, one day you're going to be right. But I do think that it is worth taking a step back and asking whether or not we're in a different place than we were in [previous economic cycles]. Because as all of these economists can tell you, the market is not responding the way they thought it would.
We have a lot of work to do. We want to make sure we get to a soft landing. It looks like we're heading that way and we're hopeful, but that didn't happen by accident. One of the reasons that happened is because the president passed four major pieces of legislation that have been rebuilding the economy in a completely different way and are completely distinct from trickle-down economics.
Recent polling has shown that Americans are worried about a surge in crime. And whether that's real or perceived, it's still a major source of anxiety. Can infrastructure changes and updates help make cities safer?
When you're governing, both perception and reality are important. You can tell people that they're not feeling what they're feeling and give them reasons why they shouldn't be, but that never really lands very well.
The physical design of a city or community and county and the better infrastructure you have, the safer a place feels. The feelings in cities are always better when things are not crumbling and neighborhoods are not separated.
If you're building generational wealth through jobs, those individuals are working rather than succumbing to the temptation to get involved in other ways of making a living. We think about this holistically in the White House, and we think about it quite a lot. But on the law enforcement side itself, the president is attacking this from the mental health side, he's dealing with substance abuse. He's also dealing with policing and he's also dealing with guns, all those things are critically important.
China is spending nearly this much on infrastructure projects each year. How does the US keep up?
The truth of the matter is that investing in people and investing in things creates a strong economy where people can build generational wealth.
Between the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS act, there's been an $1.8 trillion dollar investment. You may recall that when this conversation started about three or four years ago, the number was $6 trillion. The fact of the matter is the unfunded deficit on capital needs in America is bigger than that. So $1.2 trillion is significant, but it's just a downpayment on what the real needs are.
Now, the other thing I will say to you is this, I've been doing this now for two years. I've been to red states and blue states, small communities, large communities, and I have not had one Republican congressman say 'I don't want clean water in my district' or 'I don't want that new road' or 'I don't want that broadband for the people that live down the street.' Everybody wants it. Everybody needs it.
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