Nostalgia for the New Deal is not typically the provenance of the Right, but in a November interview with the Hollywood Reporter, right-wing news exec-turned-Trump strategist Steve Bannon suggested the new president’s trillion-dollar infrastructure plan would recreate the heady days of the Works Progress Administration:

“With negative interest rates throughout the world, it’s the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Ship yards, iron works, get them all jacked up. We’re just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution—conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.”

One might be tempted to dismiss this bizarre pitch as, say, the product of a late-night game of ideological Mad Libs. But Trump and Bannon’s apparent rejection of neoliberal orthodoxies, including fiscal austerity and free trade, inspired hope that progressives might actually be able to negotiate with Trump on a small number of economic issues—if they could avoid collaborating in an otherwise racist, reactionary agenda. Infrastructure, in particular, was an area where the new administration implied it might break with conventional wisdom and endorse massive federal spending. For decades, governing Republicans and Democrats have neglected this sector in the name of fiscal responsibility. As a result, our bridges, levees, water treatment systems and other infrastructure require trillions of dollars in repairs, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers—not to mention the new investments in transit and renewable energy we urgently need to curb climate change.

Fast forward to Trump’s “infrastructure week” in June, however, and it’s clear that neoliberalism is alive and well under his administration. In a flashy White House ceremony on June 5—timed, it seemed, to distract the public from the Comey hearings—the president announced a “great new era in American aviation,” meaning he was asking Congress to privatize the air-traffic control system. In place of actual federal investment, Trump has signalled that he plans to ramp up federal tax incentives for public-private partnerships that hand control of our infrastructure to Wall Street firms, which are ready and willing to manage it in exchange for hefty fees. That’s a strategy pioneered, in part, by Wall Street-backed Democrats such as Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Their slow-burn privatization of local assets appears to have laid the groundwork for a scorched-earth campaign by Wall Street to buy up our infrastructure under Trump.

If you want a vision of that future, to borrow from George Orwell, imagine a human hand scrounging up coins to feed the meter—forever. Our highways, airports, sanitation systems, utilities and water systems might start to look a lot more like the parking meters Chicago privatized in an infamous 2008 deal that gave investors, including Morgan Stanley, the right to collect all revenues for 75 years in exchange for an upfront payment to the city. After hiking rates, the new private owners are on track to make their investment back by 2020, not to mention the $41 million and counting in fees for “lost revenue” they receive from the city every time a road closes.

These sorts of deals are more than just a headache for drivers. A 2014 study by Roosevelt University sociologist Stephanie Farmer found that Chicago’s parking-meter deal also tied the hands of city planners in building equitable, environmentally sustainable transit, because the city was contractually obligated to pay Morgan Stanley for each parking spot replaced by a bike or bus lane. That points to perhaps the biggest threat posed by Trump’s plan: By wresting control of key policy decisions from elected government and locking in deals for periods that often exceed human lifetimes, privatization hobbles our collective power to address some of the most pressing challenges we face, from fighting climate change to dismantling racial and economic inequality.