Every generation gets the infrastructure bill it deserves. Ours arrived with fanfare, handshakes across the aisle, and promises of transformation. What it delivered was something more familiar: a sprawling, compromise-laden document that funds some necessary projects, perpetuates others that should have been abandoned decades ago, and leaves the hardest decisions for another Congress.
The politics of infrastructure are deceptively simple. Everyone agrees bridges should not collapse. Everyone agrees roads should be drivable. The consensus evaporates the moment you ask who pays, who benefits, and whose community gets bypassed again.
Rural communities were promised broadband. Many are still waiting. Urban transit systems were promised modernization. Most received maintenance funding disguised as investment. The electric vehicle charging network was supposed to blanket the country. It remains concentrated along corridors that already had options.
None of this is surprising. Infrastructure spending has always been a vehicle for political priorities dressed up as public necessity. The question is not whether the money will be spent. It is whether it will be spent in ways that change anything or simply reinforce the geography of advantage that already exists.