The US Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), which is winding its way through Congress, makes progress toward President Biden’s campaign promise to “build back better” by investing $0.55 trillion to repair the nation’s transportation, water, and energy systems. But this allocation is only a fraction of the American Society of Civil Engineers estimated $2.5 trillion infrastructure investment deficit. To bridge this value gap, the nation must build back “wiser” by investing IIJA dollars in digitized, versatile, distributed, and inclusive infrastructure systems.
Wise infrastructure creates value by integrating digital and physical systems to sense, analyze, control, and adapt in real time. Services expand and costs decrease by building less and coordinating more. Although the IIJA dedicates funding for smart roadways that reduce congestion without costly expansion, the greater value proposition is in systems that integrate diverse infrastructure sectors. Those same smart roadways could anticipate power demand from electric vehicles, signal for increased electricity generation, and coordinate power plant dispatch with air-quality sensors to protect community health. The scientific community will be instrumental in identifying opportunities for cyber-physical systems integration and mitigating the risk that coupled systems precipitate cascading system failures.
Wise infrastructure investments also maximize asset versatility, making infrastructure multifunctional and repurposing underutilized assets on demand. Imagine sidewalks that also house a low-cost operating system for last mile infrastructure management or water utilities that exploit excess water storage capacity to modulate electricity demand and stabilize the electric power grid. The science magazine community should engage communities and manufacturers to expand multi functionality and anticipate implications for asset life span.
Wise infrastructure also maintains value over time by augmenting aging or inadequate centralized systems with distributed, small-scale systems in a hybrid network model. Rather than repairing and expanding centralized water distribution networks, for example, investment should flow into distributed, fit-for-purpose water treatment systems that enhance the resiliency of centralized networks while reducing the cost of hedging against drought, water quality fluctuations, population growth, and emerging contaminants. The scientific community must help identify new coordination, maintenance, and equity challenges raised by hybrid systems. Federal agencies should fund test beds and demonstration activities that help researchers, developers, and communities to uncover and correct new vulnerabilities.
Finally, wise infrastructure is inclusive of communities that have been bypassed, bullied, and bulldozed in past efforts to modernize. The inadequacy of current infrastructure in these neighborhoods magnifies the potential returns on investment and innovation and amplifies the importance of community-led, equity-driven infrastructure design and operation. This makes social scientists crucial partners in developing tailored, scalable, and secure digital infrastructure platforms on which future physical infrastructure operates. It also makes workforce training and public-private partnerships essential for sustaining community engagement and ensuring that these new infrastructure assets have enduring value and utility.
Critics may argue that wise infrastructure projects haven’t been proven at scale, aren’t shovel-ready job makers, or don’t fall under the silo ed jurisdictional authority of existing federal agencies. Federal program offices should be reassured by the vast number of private, municipal, and international efforts to deploy such systems and might invest in documentation tools to distill lessons from failed demonstration projects and disseminate best practices from successful ones.
Translating such insights for diverse community settings and scaling these systems nationally will create jobs for a new workforce skilled in designing, building, and operating next-generation infrastructure systems.
The IIJA should also institutionalize interagency coordination across diverse federal agencies to manage the proposed spending. The federal budget, carbon budget, and water budget all depend on exploiting second-order, systems-of-systems efficiencies across infrastructure systems.
Strategies that the United States pursues under the IIJA will determine service quality, equity, resiliency, cybers ecurity, climate preparedness, and costs for generations. The nation must not squander this opportunity to maximize returns on better infrastructure by prioritizing wiser investments.
– Meagan S. Mauter

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