Opinion: White House talks about racist infrastructure while expanding law inflating costs

During a May 12 White House press conference, Mitch Landrieu, former New Orleans mayor now serving as senior adviser to President Joe Biden, talked about how race is a factor influencing infrastructure policy decisions in the Biden White House. When asked whether he is working with Department of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on the effort to reconstruct, as Buttigieg puts it, “infrastructure that was racist in its original design and in its original execution,” Landrieu responded that “there are in fact highways, waterways, roadways … that split historic neighborhoods.”

Landrieu noted that $4 billion in federal funds, authorized through the federal infrastructure law and Inflation Reduction Act, have been appropriated to a program called Reconnecting Communities, which builds bridges and tunnels between neighborhoods divided by highways, railroads and other infrastructure.

“Sometimes it really is the case that an overpass went in a certain way that is so harmful that it’s got to come down or maybe be put underground,” Secretary Buttigieg said about the Reconnecting Communities program. “Other times maybe it’s not that way. Maybe the really important thing is to connect across, to add rather than subtract.”

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Buttigieg and Landrieu are not the only senior White House officials to discuss how they view important policy decisions through a racial lens. In 2021, for example, Vice President Kamala Harris touted how NASA can “track by race their averages in terms of the number of trees in the neighborhood where people live.” The Tree Equity Score describes trees as “critical infrastructure that every person in every neighborhood deserves — a basic right that we must secure.”

Given the Biden White House’s preoccupation with race, particularly the real or alleged racial motivations behind past policy decisions, it’s odd that no one in the Biden administration is talking about the Davis-Bacon Act, a 90-year-old federal law enacted for blatantly racist reasons (to keep Black men out of the workforce). Congressman Robert Bacon, a Long Island Republican, was furious that a 1928 project in his district was awarded to an Alabama contractor who employed African American workers. The Davis-Bacon Act, passed three years later, was Bacon’s legislative response, imposing protectionist wage mandates that would make it harder for Black workers to compete.

Secretary Buttigieg suggested in February that discrimination was leading to white construction workers taking jobs from non-white workers, which happens to mirror the original intent of Davis-Bacon.

The Davis-Bacon Act imposes minimum or “prevailing” wage mandates that significantly inflate the price of taxpayer-funded infrastructure projects. By repealing Davis-Bacon, Secretary Buttigieg could build many more equity-promoting bridges and tunnels at no additional expense. And the tree equity goals Vice President Harris has talked about would be easier to achieve as a result of Davis-Bacon’s repeal, which would save taxpayers billions of dollars.

Studies have shown Davis-Bacon wage mandates inflate labor costs approximately 22% above market value. In 2016, the Congressional Budget Office estimated a repeal of Davis-Bacon would save U.S. taxpayers $13 billion on federal construction projects over the subsequent decade. Earlier research commissioned by Institute for Justice estimated Davis-Bacon wage mandates inflate construction costs nearly $190 million every year. Adjusting for inflation, that equates to more than $330 million in annual savings.

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The Associated Builders and Contractors compiled a lengthy list of studies showing even higher costs from Davis-Bacon, including a 2022 CBO analysis showing that repeal could save $24.3 billion over the next decade and a 2022 Beacon Hill study arguing savings could actually be as much as $21 billion per year.

While Davis-Bacon’s wage mandates drive up the cost of federally-funded projects, state-level prevailing wage requirements inflate the price of state-funded infrastructure projects. In order to reduce the cost of taxpayer-funded infrastructure projects, lawmakers in Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Wisconsin and West Virginia have repealed state prevailing wage laws over the past decade. Governor Gretchen Whitmer, D-Michigan, however, has since reinstated Michigan’s prevailing wage requirements.

Secretary Buttigieg said “racism is physically built into some of our highways.” Yet Buttigieg never mentions Davis-Bacon, even though the ugly origins for its enactment are well-documented. One would think a law enacted for verifiably racist reasons that continues to inflate the cost of taxpayer-funded infrastructure projects would be something an administration like President Biden’s would want to repeal. However, not only is Biden not trying to repeal Davis-Bacon, he's working to expand its application to more taxpayer-funded projects.

Patrick Gleason, a Haywood County resident, is vice president of state affairs at Americans for Tax Reform and a senior fellow at the Beacon Center of Tennessee

This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Opinion: Repeal of Davis-Bacon Act may save billions in infrastructure