Why Are We Allowing the Private Sector to Take Over Our Public Works?

NYT OPINION: Why Are We Allowing the Private Sector to Take Over Our Public Works?
By Brett Christophers
Section: Opinion
Source: New York Times
Published Date: May 8, 2023 at 03:00AM

The Inflation Reduction Act will spur the takeover of our infrastructure by private entities, particularly large global asset managers, with likely negative consequences.

The Inflation Reduction Act will reshape the physical and economic landscape of the United States over the next decade, including in ways that might surprise a lot of people. Anyone keen to understand how should look at Brookfield Renewable Partners’ recent investment of up to $2 billion in Scout Clean Energy and Standard Solar. B.R.P. is a vehicle of Brookfield Asset Management, a leading global asset-management firm with around $800 billion of assets under management, and it purchased two American developers and owner-operators of wind and solar power-generating facilities. This took place six weeks after President Biden signed the I.R.A. into law. The I.R.A. will help accelerate the growing private ownership of U.S. infrastructure, and in particular its concentration among a handful of global asset managers like Brookfield. This is taking the United States into risky territory. The consequences for the public at large, whose well-being depends on the quality and cost of a host of infrastructure-based services, from energy to transportation, are unlikely to be positive. A common belief about both the I.R.A. and 2021’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, President Biden’s other key legislation for infrastructure investment, is that they represent a renewal of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal infrastructure programs of the 1930s. This is wrong. The signature feature of the New Deal was public ownership: Even as private firms carried out many of the tens of thousands of construction projects, almost all of the new infrastructure was funded and owned publicly. These were public works. Public ownership of major infrastructure has remained an American mainstay ever since.

Read more at: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/08/opinion/inflation-reduction-act-global-asset-managers.html