Trump Promised Beautiful Bridges and Roads. Now He’s Putting Them in Harm’s Way.

He’s “throwing out any guarantee that our infrastructure will be safe.”

Rogelio V. Solis/AP

Update 8/16 11:21 a.m.: The White House posted the text of the executive order last night. In just 28 words, one section of the order reverses stricter flood standards set by Obama, making Americans and businesses more vulnerable to heavy rains and sea-level rise.

Update 4:48 p.m.: Trump signed his infrastructure executive order Tuesday afternoon at Trump Tower before making a statement and taking questions that mostly revolved around Charlottesville. “We are literally like a third world country,” he claimed in reference to the state of the nation’s infrastructure. Trump didn’t mention that the order revokes Obama’s flood-risk program.

In his latest executive order, President Trump is expected to tell the federal government to ignore the best science out there on sea-level rise and flooding and build infrastructure projects in risky, flood-prone areas anyway. 

At a signing ceremony that will take place at his New York City Trump Tower on Tuesday, Trump will reportedly reverse an Obama-era policy from 2015 that directed agencies to set stricter standards for where roads, buildings, public housing, and other infrastructure projects receiving federal funds can be built. Before the 2015 order, federal agencies usually relied on historical data for predicting vulnerability to flooding instead of on future projections of sea-level rise. The order required higher elevation standards for road, bridges, and other infrastructure projects, with even stricter requirements for critical sites such as hospitals and evacuation centers.

Multiple outlets are now reporting that Trump’s impending order will tell agencies to revoke these standards. States and cities would still be able to pursue the stricter flood-risk requirements. 

The president and his administration have designed most of their policies in spite of what federal scientists have to say about sea-level rise and climate change, but this reversal has already been characterized as especially ill-conceived. 

“The fundamentals of the Obama policy were pretty simple: The taxpayer isn’t going to spend a vast amount of money to subsidize stupid things,” such as building vulnerable, flood-prone infrastructure, says Eli Lehrer, president of the R Street Institute, a group that advocates a libertarian approach to addressing climate change. “This is a terrible idea for taxpayers. Undoing it is likely to waste billions of dollars with no benefit to speak of for anybody.”

FEMA’s estimated that the US lost $260 billion in flooding damages from 1980 to 2013.

Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune added that Trump’s plan not only wastes taxpayer money, but puts people in danger. “This is climate science denial at its most dangerous,” he said in a statement. “Trump is putting vulnerable communities, federal employees, and families at risk by throwing out any guarantee that our infrastructure will be safe.”

More Mother Jones reporting on Climate Desk

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate