Sec. 2. Findings
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Congress finds that— infrastructure plays a vital role in the lives of all people in the United States; the aging infrastructure of the United States is in need of a significant investment to repair, rebuild, and modernize, and in the process, the Federal Government can take necessary steps to address economic and racial injustices that have limited opportunities for far too many people of the United States; decades of disinvestment and exclusionary policies have isolated many people of color, low-income people, and disabled individuals in the United States from opportunity across the urban centers, deindustrialized cities, rural regions, and Tribal areas of the United States, including horribly inadequate investment to ensure universal access to clean air and water, safe and reliable transportation, affordable housing, quality living wage jobs, high-speed internet, modernized schools, and parks and community facilities; while the construction of the National Highway System remains one of the most transformative achievements in the history of the United States, it came at the expense of many low-income communities as well as minority neighborhoods of all income levels that were destroyed by the construction and isolated from the broader community and from economic opportunity; investing in repairing, rebuilding, and modernizing the infrastructure of the United States presents an opportunity to learn from the mistakes of the past and reimagine how communities can design and build infrastructure to be more equitable, helping to address structural inequities faced by marginalized communities nationwide, including a lack of good paying jobs, affordable, accessible, and inclusive housing, decaying roads, bridges, and schools, inadequate access to technology, and exposure to toxic emissions and poisoned water; accessibility to quality infrastructure, training, and jobs is an issue across the United States, spanning from rural and Tribal areas to urban and suburban areas; transportation infrastructure has a significant impact on access to jobs, education, healthcare, healthy foods, and other essential services; accessibility to essential services is defined not only by speed, but also by ease of access, which includes the ability to safely and conveniently access services by all modes of travel; with a shortage of construction firms that are ready and able to take on the large-scale infrastructure projects the United States demands, the close to 478,000 specialty trade contractors in smaller minority, women, and disadvantaged businesses could be supported to meet this demand; small businesses and under-represented contractors, including minority-, women-, veteran-owned businesses, and businesses owned by disabled individuals should have the opportunity to rebuild their communities and employ hardworking people of the United States along the way; as of 2018, about ¼ of the infrastructure workforce is projected to retire or permanently leave their jobs over the next decade, compounding the infrastructure crisis in the United States; as of 2019, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System finds that skilled trades and many occupations that do not require a 4-year degree are not considered to be at significant risk of automation; infrastructure jobs include a wide range of employment opportunities in both the public and private sectors, including design, manufacturing, construction, operation, governance, and maintenance of infrastructure assets in the United States; more than 1 in 10 jobs in the United States is a transportation- or infrastructure-related job; many infrastructure jobs provide competitive wages with low barriers to entry, many of which require on-the-job training in lieu of formal 4-year degree higher education programs; in spite of rising income inequality, infrastructure jobs paid approximately 30 percent more to low income individuals than other occupations in 2018; women, people of color, and particularly women of color are underrepresented in construction jobs; while women across all occupations currently make up about 50 percent of the workforce, women in construction and extraction occupations has hovered around 3 percent for the last 3 decades; while Black Americans make up about 12 percent of the overall workforce, Black Americans only represent 7 percent of construction and extraction occupations; by focusing on improving workforce development systems through targeted employment strategies, the Federal Government can improve the quality of future projects and better ensure that all communities benefit from investments that— protect workers; expand opportunities for advancement; establish strong labor standards; and redress discriminatory policies that have unfairly burdened low-income communities and communities of color with pollution of geographic isolation; and the Federal Government should make concerted efforts to close the workforce gap, through coordination with States and units of local government, workforce development agencies, national and regional nonprofit intermediaries, labor organizations, and institutions of higher education and other educational institutions, including historically Black colleges and universities and Hispanic-serving institutions, to recruit, train, and retain the next generation of infrastructure workers in the United States, with a focus on— achieving gender, ethnic, racial, and ability diversity; and recruiting and training individuals from communities with high unemployment rates, including African-American communities, Hispanic communities, Indian Tribes, the disabled community, and the LGBTQ community.