Since at least 1988, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) has maintained what they call an Infrastructure Report Card that highlights critical shortcomings in the nation’s public built environment. The reasons for this are pretty obvious: civil engineers and the construction industry in general live on the development and maintenance of infrastructure, and because so much of it is paid for by government funding, which in a democracy is supposedly under the control of the people, you should let the people know what they ought to be spending money on, infrastructure-wise. The ASCE report-card list found itself blinking in the spotlight of publicity last week when the Biden administration lifted it bodily and made it part of their promotional efforts to pass a multi-trillion-dollar spending package that is focused nominally on infrastructure. The ASCE’s definition of infrastructure and the Biden administration’s definition are two different things. To the best of my knowledge, the ASCE has no public position on the government’s funding of child care, for example, but there is money in the spending package for that. Let’s focus on the grades themselves, though, and what role public engineered infrastructure plays in the body politic.