Joe Biden delivered on infrastructure and jobs. Will voters in purple states like Pennsylvania keep this progress going?

This article was produced by Capital & Main. It is published here with permission.

As president, Donald Trump talked big and often about improving the nation’s deteriorating highways, bridges, dams, train rails and airports, which were collectively assigned a D+ by the American Society of Civil Engineers when it took stock of the country’s failing infrastructure in 2017.

By the time his term as president ended, little had changed.

Under his successor, money for repairing or rebuilding infrastructure, as well as accelerating the transition from fossil fuels with clean energy investments, has flowed coast to coast by the billions, creating jobs along the way. In Pennsylvania, which has a large backlog of neglected infrastructure work, federal data show an estimated $19.3 billion is being spent putting one of the nation’s oldest states back together again. Much of this money has been spun off from President Biden’s twin legislative achievements — the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act.

In 2021, for the first time in 20 years, the civil engineers group raised the nation’s letter grade to a C-, saying, “This is good news and an indication we’re headed in the right direction, but a lot of work remains.”

But now, with the presidential election just days away, the fate of those initiatives — and the money and tax credits they generate — may well be settled at the ballot box in battleground states such as Pennsylvania, which will help determine whether Trump gets a second shot in the White House or Vice President Kamala Harris becomes Biden’s successor.

Trump has dismissed Biden’s legislation as a “waste” of money and has vowed to claw back any unspent funds from the Inflation Reduction Act, while Project 2025 — the conservative playbook written largely by Trump’s former aides and confidants — calls for repealing the legislation altogether, as well as rolling back limits on air pollution from power plants, refineries and vehicles, and increasing subsidies for fossil fuel production.

Harris has been cautious about revealing her climate agenda, and the climate crisis and Biden’s twin stimulus initiatives sit far from the top of her policy platform. Some have posited that this strategy is designed almost entirely to win over voters in Pennsylvania, which has 19 electoral votes that could sway the election.

As a U.S. senator, Harris was an early sponsor of the Green New Deal, a proposal to address climate change, economic growth and job creation that ultimately died in committee. And as vice president, Harris was the deciding vote in approving the Inflation Reduction Act.

Whether those things are enough to win her votes in critical swing states like Pennsylvania — in order to keep the federal stimulus money flowing — is an open question.

Capital & Main reached out to the Harris and Trump campaigns but did not hear from either by publication time.

The amount of work to be done in Pennsylvania is vast — neglected public parks, run-down highways, failing public drinking water systems and aging airports.

“Pennsylvania has some of the most decaying infrastructure of any state,” said Molly Parzen, executive director of the Conservation Voters of Pennsylvania. “There’s a disinvestment across the country, but I think that is keenly felt by Pennsylvania residents.”

But on the ground, work is humming, and there are clear signs of progress.

Federal funds have flowed in for projects big and small: solar panels, train lines, rail cars, electric vehicle chargers, roads, bridges, abandoned-mine reclamation projects and abandoned-well plugging contracts, allocated in the form of grants, loans and tax credits. In the latter category, Pennsylvania lawmakers have matched federal tax credits with their own legislation: In July, for instance, Gov. Josh Shapiro signed into law a bill that creates state tax cuts for solar projects that power school districts, matching the federal funding.

The number of bridges in poor condition in the state declined 4.5% between 2018 and 2022, the American Society of Engineers Society wrote in its most recent Pennsylvania report card. In October, Shapiro boasted about Pennsylvania having repaired more deficient bridges than any other state in the nation. In 2023, his administration published a round-the-clock livestream of repairs on a section of I-95 that collapsed in Philadelphia, finished in just 12 days.

Pennsylvania secured $500 million from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to repair another bridge, this one in Harrisburg, the state’s capital. It also received $488 million from the stimulus initiatives for cleaning up abandoned mine land and has been helping low- and moderate-income homeowners secure Inflation Reduction Act-funded rebates for house retrofits and energy efficiency projects. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is also funding the development of a new train line from Scranton to New York City, a popular corridor that’s long gone without one. And in July, the state received nearly $400 million of Inflation Reduction Act funding for a climate pollution reduction program that will dole out grants for industrial decarbonization projects.

And in Allegheny County, an industrial region of Western Pennsylvania that includes Pittsburgh, newly hired workers are planting shade trees to provide relief to those who live and work in heat islands, urban areas with miles of heat-absorbing concrete and blacktop, a lack of vegetation and tall buildings that radiate heat and block air flow.

Until the work began, Allegheny County had been losing its existing tree canopy at a rate of 2% every five years, according to the Pittsburgh Canopy Alliance.

Landforce, the environmental stewardship and workforce development company that is behind the tree replenishment effort, recruits and trains adults who experience “structural barriers to stable, family sustaining, employment” and puts them to work removing invasive species, building trails and tackling tree care projects throughout Pittsburgh. Workers make $16 an hour plus bonuses and are offered career counseling to help secure their next job. In all, Landforce crews have completed more than 65,000 hours of environmental stewardship projects since the organization’s founding in 2015.

And last year, this work got a little easier when the U.S. Forest Service awarded the group, alongside others that comprise the Pittsburgh Canopy Alliance, an $8 million grant to build tree canopies in environmentally disadvantaged areas in Pittsburgh. The group has doubled its staff and services in the last year, according to executive director Ilyssa Manspeizer.

“We couldn’t do what we’re doing without the combination of federal and private funding,” Manspeizer said.

Nearly 300 miles away on the other side of the state, in the anthracite coal fields of Luzerne County, engineer George Albert said his community has seen an economic boost unlike any he’s seen in the past 30 years, after the infusion of $17.5 million in federal funding for a large abandoned-mine cleanup project.

The Nanticoke Creek watershed, which feeds the larger Susquehanna River, has been obstructed, polluted by acid mine drainage and lost flow in some areas because of underground coal mining.

Albert said the federal Army Corps of Engineers first considered cleaning up the site in the 1990s, but it wasn’t until years later that he was tapped by Earth Conservancy — a nonprofit that specializes in anthracite coal mining cleanup — to come up with his own plan. At the time, such projects could expect to only receive public funding on the scale of a few hundred thousand dollars every few years. So, receiving a $17.5 million grant poured jet fuel on their mission and offered an estimated 200 multiyear jobs to a community that has suffered since the decline of coal.

“Large projects are hard to come by,” Albert said. “To have this type of a windfall with this type of grant money coming in, it’s really beneficial, impactful to the area and provides opportunities for a wide range of folks to have work.”

Will Ragland, vice president of research for the advocacy and outreach department at the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank, has spent hours combing through press releases and headlines to compile the Biden Administration Investment Tracker, a searchable database of projects that have received federal funding over the past four years, sortable by state and industry. Looking back on Biden’s time on the campaign trail, when he first promised to put $2 trillion into green infrastructure and energy by 2024, Ragland said he believes the president has kept his promises.

“We saw during the Trump administration just how hard and challenging it is to get an infrastructure bill written, let alone passed and through Congress,” he said. “Joe Biden delivered on that early, and investments [have] gone out the door and [are] making a real impact now.”

Trump once made similar promises and, as Capital & Main reported in 2020, fell short. Democrats reached across the aisle in an effort to reach an infrastructure deal, but by the end of his term, there was “still next to nothing to show for Trump’s promises,” Jared Brey wrote for Capital & Main.

But those on the ground are now seeing projects taking shape across the Keystone State. “It goes on and on,” said Dana Kuhnline, program director for ReImagine Appalachia, a nonprofit created to rebuild Appalachian economies left ravaged by the now-dying coal sector, of the federal stimulus money.

“It’s really transformative,” she said but stressed that these projects need more time to flourish. “It’s just we haven’t had time to see this change. It takes longer than a year to transform a regional economy.”

Kuhnline has witnessed how organizations and local governments alike have pooled their resources to apply for newly available federal funding. Many local leaders are operating in areas with unreliable internet and might be filling out documents on typewriters or by hand, she said. Manspeizer, the director of the tree-planting project, said the work isn’t for the faint of heart: It took her organization years to get into a position where it could handle the administrative load of applying for large federal grants.

And Kuhnline stressed that while it’s crucial to rebuilding local economies, the funding that the federal government has poured into infrastructure and economic repair is not nearly enough. Projects take a long time to get off the ground, and investors are looking at long-term viability when they choose to fund a project.

“This is a region that’s used to having things taken away,” she said. That’s made the threat of a rollback of the initiatives troubling to those who’ve seen the federal money put to work.

Trump’s third bid for office has yet to include any major promises for fixing the nation’s infrastructure, though he has proposed building 10 new cities on federal land, developing flying cars, rolling back vehicle pollution standards, and renewed a promise to “drill, baby, drill.” When he was still the president, he promised “gleaming new roads, bridges, highways, railways, and waterways.” But he’s mentioned none of that in this campaign.

“Donald Trump was president, sadly, one time before, and he was completely hostile to mass transit,” said Justin Balik, senior state program director for Evergreen Action, which created a climate playbook that argues that the Biden administration has “made significant progress” on clean energy investments. By comparison, the organization wrote that “Trump was presiding over a corrupt administration, doing his best to eviscerate the Environmental Protection Agency, roll back key environmental protections to serve his fossil industry cronies, and proudly denouncing the value of science.”

“We have a track record,” Balik said. “Cronyism was rampant throughout the Trump administration. … That, on steroids, with less guardrails, is probably something we would expect from a second Trump term.”

Balik also cites the far-right policy plan Project 2025, from which Trump has attempted to distance himself. Three hundred pages into the wish list is a recommendation for the federal Department of Energy: “Support repeal of massive spending bills like the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and Inflation Reduction Act.”

Some of the funding promised by the initiatives has already been given out and couldn’t be revoked even if the legislation is struck down. But hanging in the balance are unspent funds and tax credits designed to incentivize the creation of a clean-energy economy.

By comparison, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ economic plan cites her work to secure these funds as vice president amid a divided Congress. It promises to “sharpen America’s edge in sectors that are critical for our economic and national security,” such as manufacturing, technology and clean energy. It pledges to create tax credits that will continue to aid these sectors.

Balik praises the Biden administration for making tangible strides toward a green future. But he believes Biden’s initiatives are still not enough. He hopes to see a new administration issue a federal clean electricity standard, take meaningful steps toward building energy-efficient and affordable housing and regulate emissions from heavy industry.

Copyright Capital & Main 2024