During the presidential transition that took place at the beginning of this year, I was asked to provide my thoughts on how a Trump administration should prioritize what was anticipated to be up to a trillion dollars in infrastructure spending. It was an honor — and a testament to how large the Strong Towns movement has grown — to be asked to weigh in with some notes. I knew the odds of our foundational ideas being given serious weight was remote since, if asked what the federal government should do on infrastructure spending, I would have argued: the less the better. So, in the spirit of pragmatism, I tried a different approach.

The question we at Strong Towns asked ourselves was this: If America's going to spend $1 trillion on infrastructure, how could that be done in the least damaging way? Using Strong Towns' framing, how could we limit the downside damage of a surge in infrastructure spending in 2017 and increase the likelihood that there would be some long term upside to these investments?

While he was roundly criticized for making the comment at the time, I was and remain sympathetic to Donald Rumsfield's observation during the war with Iraq that you go to war with the military you have, not the one you wished you had. At its core, it's an acknowledgement that, particularly in major matters, we will never have the ideal set of conditions for moving ahead. Anyone who has successfully managed a complex system for any length of time grasps this intuitively, making reaction to Rumsfield's comments a litmus test of sorts for a certain type of competency. I referenced it in my comments below as a way to signal that we grasp this limitation.

I ultimately framed my remarks as an open letter because it helped me think more like a politician and less like a policy advocate, and because I thought it would be helpful for the communities that received this money to think about things in this way. The four-point framing, while not universal, is simple to understand and, if followed, would generally produce better results than whatever is ultimately done.

Speaking of which, despite seemingly broad consensus among elected officials, policy advisers and pundits that the smartest course of action for the United States is to spend a colossal sum of federal money on infrastructure, we haven't done it. Perhaps it will happen in 2018, but perhaps not. I'm not going to take the credit for the hesitation, but every day this is put off, we build more of a groundswell of opposition to our current infrastructure approach. If serious reform is not an option, here's to another year of inaction. - Chuck Marohn