How Trump can Invest in Infrastructure and Make America’s Military Great Again

Dan Goure

Security, United States

For President-elect Trump this is the proverbial hat trick: infrastructure spending plus improved national defense plus high paying jobs.

During his winning campaign and in the month since, President-elect Donald Trump has promised to make America great again by, in part, massive infrastructure spending and rebuilding the U.S. military.  History provides a valuable lesson for the incoming administration on how to make a dollar of increased spending serve multiple purposes. Simply put, investing in defense infrastructure such as naval shipyards and ammunition production facilities will help rebuild both the nation’s infrastructure and its military.

The turning point for the U.S. in the Pacific during World War II was the battle of Midway. Aircraft from three American aircraft carriers, the Yorktown, Enterprise and Hornet, successfully engaged a much larger Japanese fleet including six aircraft carriers, sinking four of them and forcing the Japanese to retreat. From this point forward the U.S. held the initiative, proceeding inexorably across the Pacific to victory.

While the story of the battle of Midway is well known what is not generally recognized is that essential to our success in that engagement was infrastructure money. To combat the effects of the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt started a number of programs to stimulate the economy. Two of them were the Public Works Administration (PWA) and the similarly named Works Project Administration (WPA).

The PWA focused primarily on large infrastructure and construction projects, the equivalent of “shovel ready” programs in the 1930s. The WPA focused on light construction; it acted as both an employer of last resort and a social relief agency. Both the PWA and WPA sponsored road and highway projects, the construction of sewage, water and gas systems, and the building of schools, courthouses, hospitals, jails, dams, locks, bridges, tunnels and airports. The Lincoln Tunnel and La Guardia Airport in New York, the Tennessee Valley Authority and Boulder Dam were built with PWA funds. Just the kind of infrastructure projects President-elect Trump has proposed.