Concerns over the possible Federal Government shutdown next month are causing headaches for contractors of much-needed infrastructure projects across the country who fear a chain reaction in the construction industry could leave lasting setbacks that would take years to overcome.
A stop-work on October 1st would exacerbate the industry's sustained backlog of infrastructure builds and threatens to imperil important areas in the now two-year-old Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that are, in many cases, tethered to a multilayered compendium of different funding sources.
“Most projects these days have lots of different funding sources, they maybe have local and state and federal, maybe a private component, maybe an authority,” the President of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Maria Lehman, explained to Construction Dive this week. “So a shutdown has a much bigger impact than it might have been in the past as far as the number of projects potentially that could get hit.”
“It is a system, and one chink is going to have a ripple through the whole thing … everybody’s going to be impacted on some level,” she continued.
In that system is a vast network of frequently decaying nodes that underlies the county’s economy. Airports, federal highways, rail networks, commercial ports, waterways, and other transit systems are all separately at risk to mandatory employee furloughs, delayed environmental review processes, and reluctant state agencies if a potentially weeks-long shutdown were to become a reality.
The list of large-scale projects that could be impacted includes the $12.3 billion Gateway Program Hudson Tunnel in New York/New Jersey, the Vegas Loop, and the Las Vegas-to-SoCal High-Speed Rail connector from Brightline. The White House recently cautioned “real and avoidable” consequences particular to infrastructure if hardliner Republican Members of Congress do not yield to their colleagues in both parties. An emergency bill to fund the government through November 17th failed Tuesday night in the Senate. Congress now has until Sunday to avoid the shutdown.
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