As the construction industry seeks to learn more about the incoming Trump administration and congressional Republican tide, Dave Bauer, the American Road & Transportation Builders Association president and CEO, spoke by phone on Nov. 7 with ENR Washington Bureau Chief Tom Ichniowski about what might lie ahead.
As the transition in Washington begins to move into higher gear, Bauer suggests some developments to watch in coming days and weeks.
First, says Bauer, ARTBA’s CEO since 2019, when the issue of party control of the House will be resolved. As of Nov. 11, Republicans were leading but some races had not yet been settled.
Next, Bauer says observers should watch how the new administration assembles its team.
“We’re going to see what the personnel decisions of the new administration are,” he says. “And that will give us our first indication of where things are going.”
For example, on Nov. 11 Trump named Lee Zeldin, a Republican former U.S. House member from New York, to head the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Zeldin posted the news on social media.
Those choices will have added importance, Bauer says. “There’s a long-standing axiom in Washington that ‘personnel is ‘policy.’”
Bauer says he hasn’t seen indications from the just-concluded campaign that Trump has made any changes in his past strong support for infrastructure. “It just didn’t play the role that it did in [the campaign in] 2016,” he says.
Looking back, Bauer says that during that 2016 campaign Trump was one of the staunchest advocates for infrastructure spending among the candidates.
During his first term, in 2018, Trump proposed a $1.5-trillion infrastructure plan. But that proposal did not clear Congress. Even so, Bauer notes that with the size of his plan, Trump “set the bar for a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill, that everyone—even after he was no longer in office—still pursued.”
Looking ahead to the new Congress, If Republicans do control the House, Bauer adds, “It’s going to be a really narrow majority.”
Moreover, the Senate’s GOP majority will have fewer than 60 votes, the generally held threshold for making a measure filibuster-proof. That congressional picture “is challenging in a lot of respects,” Bauer says.
A top item on the transportation construction legislative agenda is the coming surface transportation reauthorization bill. The current measure, which was part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, is due to expire Sept. 30, 2026.
Bauer highlighted one encouraging election development related to the surface transportation bill. He notes that 15 of the 19 Republicans who, along with Democrats, voted for the last major surface transportation measure in 2021 will be returning to the Senate with the new Congress.