The concept of a report card to grade the nation’s infrastructure originated in 1988 with the congressionally chartered National Council on Public Works Improvement report, Fragile Foundations: A Report on America’s Public Works. When the federal government indicated they would not be updating the report after a decade, ASCE used the approach and methodology to publish the first Report Card on America’s Infrastructure in 1998. With each new report in 2001, 2005, 2009, and now 2013, the methodology of the Report Card has been rigorously assessed so as to take into consideration all of the changing elements that affect America’s infrastructure.
In 1988, when Fragile Foundations was released, the nation’s infrastructure earned a “C,” representing an average grade based on the performance and capacity of existing public works. Among the problems identified within Fragile Foundations were increasing congestion and deferred maintenance and age of the system; the authors of the report worried that fiscal investment was inadequate to meet the current operations costs and future demands on the system. Since 1998 ASCE has released five Report Cards and found each time that these same problems persist