If voters aren’t giving Democrats much credit for Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill, there may be a simple reason for it: The road and bridges it pays for won’t be finished for years.
The gusher of infrastructure and clean energy spending unleashed through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act has yet to make a dent in the presidential race or how Americans move around the world, power their homes or fuel their cars.
NOTUS reviewed thousands of pages of local, state and federal government documents to understand the effect of the nearly $2 trillion in federal spending and tax incentives on infrastructure, broadband, clean energy and environmental cleanup passed by Congress in 2021.
We also scoured numerous independent studies on transportation and energy in the United States, local news reports and the Biden administration’s data on invest.gov to ascertain when Americans might start to see that impact in their communities — and start crediting their leaders for it.
We found that Americans will be waiting a very long time for the payoff.
Road projects with identifiable completion dates have an average delivery date in mid-2027. The average completion date was mid-2029 for road projects with over $100 million in funding. Transit riders will be waiting just as long — with big passenger rail investments (mostly bridge and tunnel projects) not expected to be complete until the mid-2030s and many transit projects still on the drawing board.
Interviews with current and former officials, planners, experts and scholars say the long construction timelines and frequent delays are due to a combination of weak state and local governance, complicated funding and the thicket of federal and state permitting laws that snarl projects in yearslong reviews and give cranky citizens far more power than they have in peer democracies. There have also been challenges in rolling out dozens of brand-new programs — with none of the billions earmarked for broadband expansion expected to reach consumers until next year at the earliest and charging infrastructure for electric vehicles slow to come online.
In addition, much of the money flowing to infrastructure is going toward reversing decades of underinvestment; only a small percentage of the funds are being directed to things like new rail or transit lines or roads, our analysis finds.
Of the 87 awards over $1 billion that fund a specific project, only three will result in brand-new transportation infrastructure: two high-speed rail lines in the western United States and an expansion of train service from Richmond, Virginia, to Raleigh, North Carolina.
The Biden administration points to thousands of smaller projects across the country that will expand transit and highway capacity and make walking and biking safer. But by and large, much of the funding is earmarked for keeping America’s aging infrastructure in working order.
“The funding in the infrastructure law was dedicated to fix things that were about to break,” said Corrigan Salerno, policy manager at Transportation for America. “I think people will not really be able to feel a difference on a daily basis, other than perhaps hearing about a new construction program, or a new bridge opening,”
“Averting catastrophe essentially doesn’t really win you much,” Salerno said.
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Standing at the mouth of the Baltimore & Potomac Tunnel in January 2023, Biden took one of many victory laps on the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
“This is a 150-year-old tunnel, and you wonder how in the hell it’s still standing,” he said of the same tunnel he commuted through so often during his years in the Senate that they called him “Amtrak Joe.”
Funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law — more than $1.2 trillion in federal spending signed by Biden in 2021 — will go toward fully replacing the tunnel, which was built during the Ulysses S. Grant administration.
The current project completion estimate is 2035, the year Biden would celebrate his 93rd birthday — assuming none of the delays typical of U.S. megaprojects.
The existing Baltimore & Potomac Tunnel is one big reason why trains between D.C. and New York City can’t reach the kinds of speeds that European and Asian bullet trains can reach.
Passengers leaving Tokyo for Osaka, a roughly 300-mile trip, can expect travel times of about two and a half hours on the Japanese Shinkansen rail service, with top speeds reaching about 200 miles per hour. Passengers leaving Washington, D.C., for the roughly 200-mile trip to New York City on the Acela — Amtrak’s fastest train — can expect about a three-hour trip. The Acela tops out at about 150 miles per hour, and that’s only on 41 miles of its 457-mile route between Boston and Washington, D.C.
Within the existing Baltimore & Potomac Tunnel, passenger trains are limited to 30 miles per hour because of sharp curves and a steep climb. Much of the Northeast Corridor consists of triple or quadruple tracks that allow fast trains to bypass slower or stalled trains, but in Baltimore, the line narrows to one track in each direction; a breakdown in the tunnel can cripple transportation between D.C. and New York City. In addition, the overhead power system is ancient and limits speeds. Many other stretches of track are just like Baltimore: too curvy for a train like the Shinkansen.
It’s created an incredible bottleneck: About 50 million Americans live near a station on the Northeast Corridor, and in 2021, Amtrak trains carried five times more people between Washington and New York City than all of the airlines combined. Today, 9 million passengers a year pass through the decaying tunnel, according to Amtrak — either regional commuters going into or out of the city or intercity passengers passing through on their way to points both north and south.
The federal government has long known of all these problems. The U.S. created an Office of High-Speed Ground Transportation in 1965 to try to build a U.S. high-speed rail system at the same time that France, Japan and other nations were building their own bullet trains. The office would mostly focus on experimenting with pie-in-the-sky ideas like strapping jet airplane turbines to trains rather than straightening the tracks, replacing old power lines and repairing tunnels that were holding back U.S. high-speed trains.
Yet the politics around studying, funding and actually building the tunnel took nearly two decades to get into gear after that initial 2005 report recommended a new tunnel.
In 2014, according to The Baltimore Sun, Amtrak’s then-CEO Joseph Boardman groused that there was “no money. There is no leadership. There is no delivery of what we need for the future of this nation.”
With the passage of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, there is now money and political leadership — but delivery remains the challenge. Amtrak must manage the tricky urban politics of Baltimore, where many residents are unhappy about the underground project. (Amtrak has committed to spending $50 million in workforce development, improving urban amenities and community development to try to placate angry residents.)
The original Baltimore & Potomac Tunnel was dug by hand in the 1870s without modern construction techniques in just over two years. When the tunneling gets underway in 2026 for its 21st-century replacement, it will be dug by a modern boring machine rather than workers with hand tools, a process that’s estimated to take three to four times longer than the original.
It’s not just the B&P Tunnel that is seeing substantial ballooning in completion times for projects — even projects that simply replace infrastructure that’s already there.
Funds from the infrastructure law will replace the aging Sagamore Bridge, spanning the Cape Cod Canal in Massachusetts. The original was built in less than two years in the 1930s. The state of Massachusetts estimates that the replacement will take 8 to 10 years. The same is true of the Long Bridge connecting Washington, D.C., to Virginia. The original Long Bridge was built between 1902 and 1904 — its 21st-century replacement calls for a six-year construction timeline to be finished in 2030. It’s been on the drawing board since 2011. The Blatnik Bridge connecting Duluth, Minnesota, to Superior, Wisconsin, was built between 1958 and 1961. The replacement is slated to break ground in 2026 and be finished in 2032 — a construction time of twice as long as the original.
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There’s not a single factor which leads to American infrastructure projects lingering in multi-decade limbo.
Projects like Japan’s Shinkansen or France’s TGV high-speed train, or the hundreds of miles of high-speed rail the Spanish have built over the past generation, are often funded entirely by the national government — and no coordination or permission is needed from local governments. Those countries also give citizens less ability to hold up projects and empower planners to make quicker decisions in the public interest.
“Most everywhere else in the world, the government’s willing to finance it and the public is willing to vote for people that would do that. In this country, we don’t trust the government to do it,” said Ken Briers, a retired railroad engineer and transportation consultant. “Our environmental requirements are much stricter than most other places. And I think that’s a good thing, but it certainly does slow things down.”
When Barack Obama tried to get $787 billion in infrastructure money out the door in 2009 to stimulate a flagging economy, he touted the law as funding “shovel-ready” projects that would get idle construction workers and unionized skilled laborers back on job sites as fast as possible. Biden had a front-row seat to the implementation of that law: Obama jokingly labeled him the “sheriff” and gave him the portfolio of implementing the law and ferreting out waste, fraud and abuse.
One such project — a bid to get Chicago to St. Louis trains up to 110 miles per hour — got more than a billion dollars in Recovery Act money. It was aimed to be finished sometime between 2015 and 2017 but was delayed, as many projects are. After 13 years of work, the project shaved about 30 minutes off the one-way travel time for Amtrak trains traveling on the route. Amtrak trains finally started running at 110 mph in the summer of 2023.
Obama was forced to acknowledge this reality: At a permitting summit in 2011 he would say, “Shovel-ready was not as, uh, shovel-ready as we expected.”
That same year, he ordered heads of executive departments and agencies to take all possible steps to speed up infrastructure projects — but there is only so much the federal government can do absent serious reforms to the way projects get funded and built because of the thicket of federal, state and local bureaucracy required to do most projects.
The U.S. is also a unique litigious society, and U.S. law gives an outsized role to citizens in delaying or blocking projects — letting them take the government to court over inadequate environmental studies, for example.
The reality of building things in America means years of paperwork. In addition, building in America is also expensive — with costs that far outstrip peer countries.
There is a reason for that. Highway builders in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s cut destructive swaths through U.S. neighborhoods to build the interstate system and other infrastructure projects. Often, those neighborhoods were poor and nonwhite — and cities today are still trying to undo some of the damage that elevated expressways did to downtowns and urban residential neighborhoods.
“The U.S. did some pretty horrible things in building infrastructure in the ’50s and ’60s. And I think there was a big desire to course correct,” said Leah Brooks, an economist at George Washington University who studies urban policy.
In response to concerns from citizens in the 1970s, Congress passed laws that forced agencies to take into account the environmental impact of federal decisions, including anything funded with federal money. Agencies were also obligated to have a comment period where they heard feedback from the public.
Building a highway mile tripled in costs between the 1960s and 1980, according to research from Brooks and Yale Law School professor Zachary Liscow. They hypothesize that a new legal regime was put in place in the 1970s that gave citizens a bigger voice in what the government builds — and the ability to go to court to block it — made construction more expensive.
Since the enactment of the National Environmental Policy Act in 1970, environmental review and other permitting documentation have exploded in length and complexity. A full environmental review between 2010 and 2017 took over 4 and a half years and ran thousands of pages. Between 1994 and 1999, the median length was 650 pages. In the 21st century, their length started to swell. Between 2011 and 2016, the median grew to 1,600 pages. One environmental review document swelled to 11,000 pages. Another took more than 17 years to complete.
The Baltimore & Potomac Tunnel’s environment review took about three years — fast by comparison to the average. When agencies rush an environmental review, that can dramatically increase the risk of litigation and the chance that a judge will send them back to redo the document. Since the law’s enactment, courts have halted over 2,000 projects for errors or omissions in the environmental review documents.
“There is a strong drive because projects can be halted by the courts if they find faults with the environmental process to make the environmental document bulletproof. That’s why you get documents that are 1,500 pages long that shouldn’t be longer than 150,” said Peter Rogoff, former undersecretary of transportation for policy at the U.S. Department of Transportation who went on to serve as the CEO of Seattle’s transit system and is now a consultant.
And while those tools gave local activists a useful cudgel to keep highway projects from tearing up urban neighborhoods, today they’re just as frequently used to block infrastructure that would make a tangible difference to mobility and energy efficiency.
“We always wish it could be faster. But I do think that the Biden-Harris administration has done a good job moving as fast as they can, recognizing that governance processes are not designed to be super fast,” said Amanda Leland, who serves as executive director of the Environmental Defense Fund. “Communities have to live with these projects nearby. And in many cases, they’re going to be projects that help bring jobs to communities, help clean up the air.”
In some circumstances, the U.S. can move fast if it needs to. When a bridge carrying I-35W collapsed in Minnesota in 2007, the environmental review was done in three weeks and the entire project of replacing the ruined bridge was finished in about a year. When a truck carrying gasoline exploded in Pennsylvania last year and caused the collapse of I-95, one of the nation’s busiest highways, it was reopened to traffic in 12 days.
But most of the time, lacking that kind of political will, projects linger for decades.
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In response to NOTUS’ reporting, the White House pointed to projects all across the country that the administration said would have tremendous local impact.
“We’ve announced $580 billion in public investments. That’s about 67,000 projects that are underway across all of all the states, D.C. and the territories. Thousands of those are already completed,” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Natalie Quillian said in an interview.
In addition to the big megaprojects, Quillian said: “There’s also small projects in communities that have often not gotten federal dollars in the past. And that’s a big part of the way the president has directed us to implement this bill is that this needs to take care of historic underinvestment — decades of underinvestment in our infrastructure — but also make sure it takes care of historic trend of leaving behind communities that often haven’t gotten attention from the federal government.”
But, behind the scenes, the Biden administration knew implementation would be a challenge.
“The eye-popping figure is basically a number on a page until it’s turned into something tangible that improves life for all the people that we serve,” Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg acknowledged in 2022. In his nearly four years as secretary, Buttigieg has traveled to all 50 states at least once and done hundreds of local interviews to tout the impact of the law to communities around the country, according to a Department of Transportation spokesperson.
Biden tapped Mitch Landrieu to be the coordinator of infrastructure; he worked out of the National Economic Council. Landrieu’s mantra was “on time is late,” according to a member of the implementation task force.
The task force asked state governments to designate a single point of contact to work with federal authorities on grant opportunities to try to get projects started quickly and had monthly meetings.
The White House held a fall 2022 summit on speeding up infrastructure construction. More than 5,000 people were hired to implement the infrastructure law. The administration offered technical assistance in grant writing to local communities to help them with the paperwork required to win federal funding. They created what they called “workforce hubs,” aiming to help train workers and match them with projects that need labor.
The Biden administration supported tweaks to environmental permitting that passed as part of the infrastructure law and says that through executive action, it has cut the length of time it takes for agencies to do full-bore environmental reviews by six months. Regarding transportation specifically, the administration says the Department of Transportation has completed 20% more environmental reviews than the prior administration.
And according to the department, the time to do major reviews has fallen dramatically. Between 2010 and 2018, the department took about seven years to complete a review. Since the passage of the infrastructure law, the timeline has fallen to two and a half years, according to figures provided by a spokesperson.
“Not every project grabs headlines. We’ve already replaced more than 220,000 lead pipes nationwide,” a White House official said. And state officials in Michigan, for example, pointed to the rollout of electric school buses in numerous communities as one example where the law had made a tangible difference.
Katrina Morris, executive director for the Michigan Association for Pupil Transportation, said the state now had nearly 70 buses on the road — with drivers, children and communities largely happy with their performance. “As with anything new, there’s going to be some challenges, but it has been a fairly smooth process,” Morris said.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Transportation said: “The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law has made a once-in-a-generation investment to rebuild America’s roads, bridges and rails, and we’re making sure it is done as quickly as possible and with maximal benefit to all Americans. We’ve accomplished this by expediting permitting reviews, streamlining federal processes, using flexible authorities and adding new technical assistance resources for states and local communities where the vast majority of project work is completed.”
But it’s hard breaking the United States out of its deeply ingrained patterns. Local governments remain understaffed and reliant on federal dollars and outside consultants to build projects. Federal agencies still have to operate within the constraints of environmental laws that have grown cumbersome. And new programs cannot be created overnight.
“We’re training and getting up to speed a whole system that’s been sitting idle,” said Marsia Geldert-Murphey, the president of the American Society of Civil Engineers. “The projects are happening. We just have a system that’s rusty. We’re working on that.”
The reality is that passing infrastructure bills isn’t a political win on its own. Getting a bridge built is.
A Politico-Morning Consult poll this year shows only 26% of voters saying the laws had a major impact, with the rest saying it had little or no impact on their community or they have no opinion. The same poll showed that 40% of registered voters say that Biden did more on infrastructure than Trump, while 37% said the opposite. Another 12% said both have done about the same.
The joke during the Trump administration represented the hope that if the White House could just stay on message, it could talk about something broadly popular — a real political winner. In 2019, CNN counted seven separate times that the Trump White House declared “infrastructure week,” only to have its best-laid plans thwarted — usually by Trump himself.
But perhaps it was a pipe dream for a president of any party to believe that infrastructure would be a political winner given the way the United States does things — and how deeply polarized the country is.
“This was never going to be an issue where the political impacts or the economic impacts were all going to play out in one election cycle,” said Josh Freed, senior vice president for climate and energy at the center-left group Third Way. Trillion-dollar infrastructure packages are only occasionally attempted and implemented, Freed said, because “political strategists recognize that these things are not only hard, but they take a lot of time.”
“It’s helping in the specific places — where we are starting to see projects be built, where people are seeing the impacts happen. But that takes a long time,” Freed said.
With completion timelines so far in the future for so many projects and so focused on digging the United States out of a decades-long cycle of underinvestment and political dysfunction, perhaps expecting the law to also boost the political fortunes of its authors was expecting too much.
“The lack of action over the last generation created outsized expectations,” said one official who worked on implementation of the laws. “It was meant to do a lot of great things. But you’re asking it to be a replacement for the past and to complement the future. That’s a lot to ask.”
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Byron Tau is a reporter at NOTUS. Nuha Dolby and Ben T.N. Mause, NOTUS reporters and Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows contributed to this report.