Chairman Gosar, Ranking Member Lowenthal, and members of the subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to testify today. I am honored to be here to contribute to the subcommittee’s infrastructure work. My name is Cathleen Kelly, and I am a Senior Fellow for Energy and Environment at the Center for American Progress, a nonprofit think tank dedicated to improving the lives of Americans through progressive ideas and actions.
Americans rightly expect that the infrastructure that people and the private sector rely on every day—from roads and bridges to power plants, electric grids, dams, drinking water, and wastewater treatment facilities—is safe and structurally sound. Yet just this month, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave our nation’s infrastructure a D+ rating and identified a $2 trillion investment gap that must be filled over the next 10 years to modernize it.
Today, I’m going to focus my testimony on three points that this subcommittee and the Congress as a whole must consider as it designs a plan to upgrade the nation’s infrastructure and support U.S. economic competitiveness.
The above excerpt was originally published in House Committee on Natural Resources.
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