Infrastructure privatization raises costs for basic services, undermines transparency and is frequently used to keep government costs “off the books.” Disastrous examples in the United States include a deal by the water company Suez and the private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts to privatize the water system in Bayonne, N.J., which has left some residents in danger of losing their homes after skyrocketing water rates.

Although business executives, national officials and other global financiers and deal-makers may disagree with Mr. Trump on trade, they are with his administration on infrastructure privatization. The World Bank, to take a prominent example, has a long history of pushing the privatization of people’s most basic infrastructure need — water. Perhaps the best-known example is Cochabamba, Bolivia, where popular opposition to the privatization of the water system forced a return to a publicly run system in 2000. In another failed privatization, this time branded as a public-private partnership, residents of Manila face unreliable access, infrastructure neglect and rates that are unaffordable for many.

While the World Bank claims to have no preference between public and private infrastructure, promoting public-private partnerships remains its bread and butter. At a 2016 training event, bank staff learned “how to promote water P.P.P. projects” and convince government officials “of the interest of the P.P.P. approach.” What’s more, bank leadership is now evangelizing what it calls the “Cascade” approach, which prescribes the bank to “first consider private investment for projects; then public-private partnerships; and if the first two are not available then, only then, consider public finance.”

The budget of the World Bank’s International Development Association, which advances the bank’s development priorities in the lowest-income countries, recently added $2.5 billion to provide corporations with risk insurance, guarantees, loans and equity investments.

The Trump administration and World Bank leadership clearly have shared interests, despite Mr. Trump’s threat of deep cuts to development funding. The bank’s president, Jim Yong Kim, has raised eyebrows by offering bank staff members to advise Mr. Trump on infrastructure policy. At a World Bank conference last October, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin praised what he called the Cascade approach’s key pillar: that the World Bank “will not provide financing if the private sector is able to do so.” Perhaps this shared pro-corporate vision is why Mr. Trump has proposed funding the World Bank at levels close to the Obama-era budget last year.