Infrastructure’s Upward Momentum Reflected in Report Card
ASCE’s 2025 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure gave the nation an overall grade of C, its highest since grading began in 1998, thanks in part to major federal investments like the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. While progress is being made, experts stress that continued funding and patience are essential, as most large-scale projects take years to plan, build, and yield measurable impacts.
“The trend is in the right direction,” says Darren Olson, P.E., BC.WRE, M.ASCE, the chair of ASCE’s Committee on America’s Infrastructure, which produces the report card. “I think we’ve been very successful since (1998) in working with our elected officials to talk to them about how poor the condition of our country’s infrastructure had gotten after decades of underinvestment and just how important it (is) — whether you talk about the public welfare, our national economy, public safety — to invest in (it).”
Those investments have been significant since the last report card’s release. Chief among them is the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which was signed into law in November 2021 and authorizes $1.2 trillion for infrastructure spending between 2022 and 2026. With authorization expiring next year, Congress must decide how programs under the legislation will be funded going forward. The Inflation Reduction Act, passed in 2022, was also beneficial to infrastructure investments, providing $369 billion for energy security and environmental programs.
With so much money going toward our infrastructure, it may be natural to wonder why the grades are not even better. The answer: These things take continued effort and sustained funding.
Olson preaches patience.
“It takes a while to get these projects from a planning stage or even an engineering stage to actually constructed, where their impacts are being felt by the public,” says Olson, who is a vice president and head of the water resources department at Christopher B. Burke Engineering Ltd. in Rosemont, Illinois.
“I think we’ve set ourselves up fairly well to hopefully continue this trajectory upward with this funding that we’ve received. But there just simply weren’t enough projects that have been constructed and not enough metrics out there on projects that had been constructed to justify raising the grades in a lot of the categories,” Olson explains.
