Self-Proclaimed Renegade candidate for US Senate Blasts Opponent’s Infrastructure Bill

May 18, 2021 11:44 AM

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SCHAUMBURG – By a resounding vote not exceeded in magnitude since a resolution to condemn the killing and dissolution of Jamal Khashoggi, the U.S. Senate in late April passed the Drinking Water and Wastewater Infrastructure bill of 2021, sponsored by L. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois.

The bill has been praised by members of the senate as both timely and bipartisan. Thomas Carper of Delaware, one its several authors, touted the bill as redressing a crisis, “that is acutely felt by the most vulnerable among us[,]” and co-sponsor Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia implied the bill would, “advance infrastructure to help local communities keep water safe and clean.”

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Yet Carper and Capito, among others, succumbed thereafter to self-congratulatory praise, the former having sought refuge in cliché, “I oftentimes say that bipartisan solutions are lasting solutions[,]” and the latter insisting the bill’s symbolism above its substance, “I’m hopeful that as we move forward with our work on other infrastructural [sic] priorities that we remember this moment.”

A candidate for the US Senate in Illinois is nonetheless dismissively critical of the bill and its authors.

“The Drinking Water and Wastewater Infrastructure bill perplexes by its omissions of infrastructure and frustrates by its ignorance of public health,” maintains W. Thomas Olson of suburban Chicago. “It should come as no surprise that ex-soldiers in the US Senate prattle of policies whilst polluting public law.”

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According to the Library of Congress, the 2021 bill amends the Safe Drinking Water Act (of 1974) and the Federal Water Pollution Control Act (of 1948), the former law itself an amendment to the Public Health Service Act of 1944, a law compromised by war and spoiled by nationalist zeal. “Competent lawmakers would have given both a closer look before amending either,” Olson maintains.

The Public Health Service drew, by legislative design, from the ranks of military an administrative corps of personnel to staff it, and executed a mission of exclusion from its inception: Convicts, addicts, lepers and aliens were segregated for disparate and oftentimes barbaric treatment, and women suffered the consequences of an odiously duplicitous provision, which in a pertinent, however perplexing or shamelessly patriarchal, part reads, “female commissioned officers of the Service shall receive the same pay and allowances as male officers of corresponding grades, including allowances for dependents, except that no allowance shall be paid to any female commissioned officer on account of any dependent who is not in fact dependent upon such officer for his or her chief support. For purposes of this subsection the term ‘dependent’ shall include a husband, father, mother, and unmarried children (including stepchildren and adopted children under twenty-one years of age.” The text of the 1944 Public Health Service act traversed an enormously diverse terrain of public law and bears myriad marks of compromise. It vested a National Cancer Institute as a division of the National Institute of Health, provisioned a Surgeon General with administrative jurisdiction adhering quarantines, regulated the manufacture and distribution of biological products, and appropriated $20M annually for purposes of “demonstrations and [t]raining of personnel of State and local health work[.]” Aid in the form of grants could also be made to “universities, hospitals, laboratories, and other public or private institutions, and to individuals for [r]esearch projects[.]” When awarded to States, grants could be used for “prevention [and] treatment[.]” In contradistinction to federalist grant-making for purposes of developing local infrastructure, the Act thus heaped funds into technical research and bureaucratic administration.

The Federal Water Pollution Control act of four years later finally appropriated loans and grants to develop infrastructure related to public health and pollution, yet the amounts were comparatively tiny. Conditional loans in the aggregate amount of $4.5M per year were made available by the act, and grants to States and municipalities in the amount of $1M annually were provisioned—neither could exceed one-third of the “estimated reasonable cost” of a project, and both forms of aid could be used to defray costs of “studies, surveys, designs, plans, [and] working drawings[.]” By comparison, annual funding to carry out the bureaucratic functions of the act were set at exactly twice the amount of grants for capital infrastructure improvements.

Olson insists, “The former relic of law amended by the 2021 bill financed absolutely no capital infrastructure, and the latter did little more than send money to the states to research and police the problem of untreated sewage. After nearly a quarter century of unimaginative amendatory laws, we’re left with poisonous water in Flint and ruinously sickening water in not a few other places.”

The Congressional Budget Office was also perplexed by the legislation. Unable to analyze the bill in full due to its arcane provisioning of funds, it reads, in pertinent parts, “[T]he bill would cause future loans or loan guarantees to be recorded in the budget at a lower cost than is required under the recording statute[,]” and “the bill’s enactment would result in an understatement of the initial funding amounts required [w]hen the federal government is a counterparty.”

Olson adds, “Accounting has never been a strong suit of lousy lawmakers,” yet the bill, he asserts, “indicates a semi-literacy which obfuscates empiric waste and rampant war-making.” The CBO estimates the 2021 amendments to the 1940’s laws will cost $30M per year by 2026. Last year, the bill’s sponsor voted for a National Defense Authorization to appropriate $2.6B for ammunition for the Army.

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