What 4 Years of Trump’s Transportation Budgets Add Up to

President Donald Trump’s 2021 budget request describes a $810 billion, 10-year surface transportation reauthorization bill as part of a proposed $1 trillion infrastructure investment. But the budget also calls for a 13 percent cut to discretionary spending for the U.S. Department of Transportation, the largest infrastructure-building agency in the cabinet. That, in a nutshell, has been the persistent theme of the Trump administration when it comes to infrastructure: big talk, little action, and plenty of mixed messages in between. Like many politicians—including the quartet of Democratic presidential candidates who held a first-of-its-kind “infrastructure forum” in Nevada on Sunday—Trump talked up a storm about America’s crumbling infrastructure in his first campaign. “We have bridges that are falling down,” he told Fox News in August 2016. “We have many, many bridges that are in danger of falling.” While his then-rival Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton proposed a $500 billion infrastructure raft, Trump upped the rhetorical ante to $1 trillion a few days before the election. Once he got into office, Democrats in Congress viewed the issue as a rare patch of potential common ground with the ultra-divisive chief executive, and hoped to build something on it.