The Great Bipartisan Infrastructure Alliance Completes Third Year Without Infrastructure

The American Bipartisan Infrastructure Renewal Initiative, launched in 2021 to thunderous applause and a professionally lit press conference, has marked its third anniversary with a retrospective celebration of its accomplishments. Chief among those accomplishments, according to its own materials, is the press conference.

WASHINGTON — In the spring of 2021, with the country's bridges quietly crumbling and its broadband maps bearing only a passing relationship to reality, a group of senators from both parties stood before a bank of cameras and announced that something was finally going to be done.

They shook hands. They smiled. Someone had arranged for American flags at precise intervals behind them. The lighting was, by all accounts, excellent.

Three years later, the American Bipartisan Infrastructure Renewal Initiative — known by the acronym ABIRI, pronounced by no one — has released what it is calling a "milestone retrospective" of its work. The document, a glossy forty-page publication printed on paper of noticeably high quality, contains twenty-six photographs of officials shaking hands, fourteen photographs of officials standing near things that could be described as infrastructure, and a foreword from the initiative's co-chairs describing the past three years as "a testament to what's possible when Washington sets aside division and gets to work."

What work, precisely, is addressed on page thirty-one, in a section titled "Progress Indicators," which lists seven items under the heading "Achievements to Date." Six of those items are press releases. The seventh is a podcast.

The Vision

The initiative was conceived, according to its founding documents, to "catalyze transformative, bipartisan action on America's infrastructure deficit through convening, coordination, and collaborative strategic engagement." Experts in government communications noted at the time that this sentence contained no verbs describing anything that would result in a road being repaired.

Senator Thomas Aldrich (R-TX), one of the initiative's co-chairs, was characteristically direct at the 2021 launch. "This is not a talking shop," he said. "This is an action coalition. We are here to do things."

The initiative subsequently held eleven press conferences, seven roundtables, four "summits," two "convenings," and one event described in the program as a "high-level strategic dialogue breakfast," at which scrambled eggs were served and a consensus communiqué was issued calling for further dialogue.

"The breakfast was very productive," said a spokesperson for the initiative. "We identified a number of areas of alignment."

The areas of alignment have not been published.

The Budget

Financial disclosures obtained through a public records request reveal that ABIRI received $11 million in funding over its first three years, drawn from a combination of congressional appropriations, foundation grants, and contributions from several infrastructure-adjacent corporations whose names appear in the initiative's materials under the heading "Strategic Partners."

Of that $11 million, approximately $8.3 million was spent on what the initiative's accounting categorizes as "communications and stakeholder engagement" — a line item that, upon further inquiry, encompasses the professional photography, event production, graphic design, media relations, social media management, and the services of a Washington public relations firm that charges $24,000 per month to ensure that coverage of the initiative's press conferences is, in the firm's own words, "appropriately framed."

The remaining $2.7 million funded staff salaries, the initiative's office space in a building two blocks from the Capitol, and the website, which was rebuilt in 2023 at a cost of $340,000 and now loads considerably faster than its predecessor while containing the same information, which is to say: very little.

"We're proud of our communications infrastructure," said initiative Executive Director Carolyn Marsh, apparently without irony. "Reaching people is the first step."

When asked what the second step was, Marsh said she would follow up.

The Photo Opportunities

What ABIRI has indisputably produced, and in impressive volume, is imagery. The initiative's media archive contains over 4,000 photographs spanning three years of operation. Approximately 2,800 feature two or more officials shaking hands. Roughly 600 show officials gesturing at maps, charts, or screens displaying the word "Infrastructure" in large font. The remaining photographs are of food at events and, in one unexplained series of forty images, a parking garage in Arlington that several sources believe was used as a location for a promotional video that was never completed.

The initiative's social media accounts, which collectively reach an audience of some 340,000 followers, post with remarkable consistency. A typical week features a Monday graphic reading "Infrastructure creates jobs" in white text on a blue background, a Wednesday photograph of a co-chair at an event, and a Friday post described as a "Friday Fact" that states something measurably true about bridges.

Engagement metrics, provided by the initiative's communications team, show that the most-liked post in ABIRI's history was a photograph of Senator Aldrich and his Democratic co-chair, Senator Patricia Voss of Oregon, laughing together at what appears to be a catered lunch. It received 14,000 likes and was shared by the accounts of eleven other bipartisan initiatives, several of which appear to have been formed primarily to share content from other bipartisan initiatives.

The Accountability Gap

A review of ABIRI's founding documents reveals that the initiative set no measurable goals. The 2021 charter commits the organization to "advancing the conversation," "building the coalition," and "creating the conditions for progress" — formulations that, by design, cannot be evaluated against any external standard.

"You can't say we failed to meet our objectives," said Senator Aldrich at Tuesday's anniversary event, which was held at a downtown hotel and catered by a company that lists several senators among its clients. "Our objective was to bring people together, and we have brought people together. Repeatedly. We have a very strong track record of that."

Senator Voss, standing beside him, nodded in a way that suggested she had been nodding for three years and had reached a kind of peace with it.

When a reporter from a regional outlet asked whether any infrastructure had been built as a result of ABIRI's work, the question was fielded by the communications director, who noted that "attribution in complex policy environments is inherently difficult" and that the initiative "remains committed to its mission."

The mission statement, according to the website, is "to advance infrastructure."

The website does not say what advancing infrastructure means.

The initiative's fourth annual summit is scheduled for April. Early promotional materials describe it as "the most ambitious convening yet." Flags have already been arranged.