Why smart infrastructure is a smart investment—for both Democrats and Republicans—in an era of historic public works spending

As the U.S. prepares to spend hundreds of billions on new projects, HKS Professor Stephen Goldsmith says successfully upgrading our infrastructure will not only require spending all that money smartly, but spending it on infrastructure that is itself smart—full of sensors that can anticipate problems before they require costly repairs and that serve multiple functions instead of just one. With the passage of 2021’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act, the federal government has ushered in levels of infrastructure spending we haven’t seen since the days of President Dwight Eisenhower. Between direct spending and loans, there could be as much as $800 billion dollars in spending the coming years on everything from roads and bridges to water treatment to public transit to climate readiness to clean energy to internet access. While the current infrastructure spending has been pushed mainly by Democrats, he says he’d also like to see Republicans rediscover their Eisenhower-style belief in public investment—both in physical infrastructure and what he calls soft infrastructure like job training and education to address social and economic inequities. Goldsmith is director of the Innovations in American Government Program at the Kennedy School, but he is also a veteran of the infrastructure front lines—having served as the mayor of Indianapolis, a deputy mayor in New York City, as a chief domestic policy advisor to the George W. Bush campaign in 2000.