page_title: Infrastructure policy of Donald Trump
section_title: Canals, ports, and harbors
hierarchical_section_title: Infrastructure policy of Donald Trump / Transportation / Canals, ports, and harbors
caption_attribution_description: English: Port of Savannah with intermodal yard at the top
context_page_description: The infrastructure policy of Donald Trump includes ensuring U.S. energy independence, safeguarding the cybersecurity of the national power grid and other critical infrastructure, locking China out of the U.S. fifth-generation Internet market, and rolling back regulations to ease the process of planning and construction. While there have been no major infrastructure spending packages yet, some individual policies and projects have advanced piecemeal, especially in rural areas.
  Although there is recognition of the need to upgrade American infrastructure from both sides of the political aisle, as of April 2020, no major infrastructure bill has been passed due to disagreements over the details of such a spending package, namely, what to spend on, how much to spend, and how to pay for it. 'Infrastructure' is a rather broad term that means different things to different people.
context_section_description: Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, regularly hosts ships traveling through the recently expanded Panama Canal. South Carolina is also home to many manufacturing plants belonging to various multinational corporations, such as the automaker BMW, the tire maker Michelin, and many others. Works to deepen it to 52 feet (15.8 m) has been ongoing since 2011 but had never been on a federal budget proposed by the President till 2018, when a new cost-benefit analysis conducted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers made it suitable for consideration. President Trump allocated $138 million to the project in his budget in 2019. Dredging started in 2018, and the State Ports Authority, which operates Charleston Harbor, said it planned to complete the project by 2021, in time for a new container terminal to open. Upon completion, it will be the deepest shipping channel in the East Coast of the United States.
  The America's Water Infrastructure Act, signed into law by President Trump in October 2018 authorizes $6 billion in spending. Potential recipients for federal funding include the Houston-Galveston Navigation Channel Extension ($15.6 million), and the Ala Wai Canal project in Hawaii ($306.5 million). This bill includes a five-year "Buy American" provision, which requires the use of American-made construction materials used by projects funded by the Act.
  The Port of Savannah, Georgia, is a busy shipping channel and the fourth largest in the United States. Worth almost a billion dollars, work has been underway since 2016 to deepen the harbor from 42 feet (12.8 m) to 47 feet (14.3 m) in order to accommodate heavier cargo ships taking advantage of the expanded Panama Canal to travel to and from the Eastern United States. At present, such ships are already visiting the Port, but they cannot carry their full loads at low tide. Cargo volumes to the Port of Savannah reached four million containers in 2017. If work goes one as scheduled, the deepening project is expected to be largely finished in 2022. As of 2020, the State of Georgia has already committed $300 million to the project, but federal funding is needed. Although President Trump's budget proposals are unlikely to make much headway in a divided Congress that must sign off federal spending packages, due to a ban on earmarks to prevent lawmakers from adding pet projects to federal budgets, anything supervised by the Army Corps of Engineers is usually funded at the level requested in budget proposals. In 2019, despite funding cuts to the Corps, the Port of Savannah received the full $130.3 million requested by Trump while In 2018, it received $186 million. For his 2020 federal budget proposal, President Trump requested $86 million for the project.
caption: Port of Savannah with intermodal yard at the top (February 2016)
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