Trump Drops Plan to Form Infrastructure Advisory Council
President Trump will not move forward with plans to form a 15-member Presidential Advisory Council on Infrastructure, various news agencies reported, citing comments by a White House official.
Among those reporting the news was the Wall Street Journal. "The President's Advisory Council on Infrastructure, which was still being formed, will not move forward," a White House official said Aug. 17, the Journal reported.
Trump had announced in a July 19 executive order that he would create the advisory group, saying the council would study the scope and effectiveness of federal infrastructure funding, as well as the support and delivery of infrastructure projects. Its focus was to include transportation projects and extend to other sectors including renewable energy, electricity transmission, broadband and pipelines.
However, Bloomberg, which first reported news of its cancellation, also noted that Trump had not yet formally appointed anyone to serve on it.
Cancellation of the infrastructure council comes in the wake of the president ending two other advisory panels – the American Manufacturing Council, and the Strategic and Policy Forum – after corporate executives and labor leaders on those panels began resigning to protest Trump's Aug. 15 comments about recent violence in Charlottesville, Va.
He had earlier named real estate developers Richard LeFrak and Steven Roth to co-chair efforts to help shape the administration's promised infrastructure investment plan and vet projects it would support.
The panel's cancellation also comes as the transportation sector waits for details of the planned infrastructure investment package, and information on how Trump proposes to pay for it.
During his election campaign he pledged to generate $1 trillion of new project investments over 10 years, and has since proposed $200 billion in direct federal funding over a decade to help leverage $800 million in new state, local and private-sector project funding.
https://news.transportation.org/Pages/081817cancel.aspx