Giving Compass' Take:

· Governing Magazine reports on Trump's infrastructure plan, while economists weigh in on its efficiency and possible outcomes, along with the current status of the US infrastructure.

· How will a new infrastructure plan influence expansion and the US economy? 

· Read more about Trump's infrastructure plan and its effects.

The fractious political times in which we live are obscuring a reality, one rarely acknowledged by advocates on the left or right, that a consensus has been growing across party lines about the future of U.S. infrastructure financing. The Trump administration's infrastructure plan is really the logical extension of the Obama administration's policy of encouraging greater private investment in public infrastructure.

The recent resignation of top White House infrastructure adviser DJ Gribbin, the chief architect of the president's plan, is not likely to result in any wholesale re-thinking of the elements of Trump's proposal that reflect that emerging consensus, which was on full display at a recent Brookings Institution confab on infrastructure policy. The event was hosted by Aaron Klein of Brookings, who was a deputy assistant Treasury secretary in the Obama administration, and was keynoted by Derek Kan, the third-ranking official in the Trump Transportation Department and former general manager of Lyft. There was a congeniality and shared purpose rarely evident on cable news or Twitter.

Klein opened the session with a simple goal statement on which he believes all can agree: "Invest more wisely." The discussion continued in that vein with no mention of the truism that the Trump plan's proposed federal funding levels are woefully insufficient to address the country's infrastructure deficiencies. Instead, economists Klein and Kan see the overarching need the same way: The current U.S. infrastructure model requires change that would result in doing more with existing resources and enhancing the value of public assets.

One can interpret the lack of major funding in the Trump plan in a few different ways - perhaps, a lack of true commitment to the need, or as a fiscal and political conclusion that the till is empty after the passage of $1.5 trillion in tax cuts. But there remains another possible explanation: a policy goal of no longer expanding funding for the long-established governmental-monopoly model that dominates the financing and delivery of U.S. infrastructure.

Read the full article about the Trump infrastructure plan by Chris Hamel and Kent Hiteshew at Governing Magazine.