President Trump’s Infrastructure Plan was officially released on February 12. As previously reported, the plan would perhaps inadvertently benefit affordable housing by lifting state volume caps on Private Activity Bonds, but it does not outline additional funding for affordable housing. What’s worse, writes Jacob Leibenluft of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, is that the Infrastructure Plan is essentially a bait and switch. The plan only promises $200 billion in federal funding which is expected to come from “budget cuts to programs in the same agencies that would receive new grant-making authority under [the] infrastructure proposal.” (The recently released budget takes a 19% cut to the Transportation Department while the Infrastructure Plan focuses primarily on improving transportation infrastructure).
The Trump Administration expects the remaining $1.3 trillion of investment to come from the private sector as well as state and local governments with no proposal for how these localities would raise such a large amount of money. Leibenluft postulates that much of the eventual cost will be borne by low- and moderate-income people.
While savings from cuts to the Department of Transportation would be sent back to that same Department in the form of grants, the same would not be true for HUD, whose cuts would also ostensibly pay for the infrastructure plan, but as affordable housing is not a part of the plan, HUD would receive nothing back in return.
