Courtesy C-SPAN
Before 1998, the public had adopted a fair understanding of what “infrastructure” was, but not of its scope. People knew a little about civil engineers, but not how extensive their work and reach was (and is).
Then, infrastructure was still on the periphery, taken mostly for granted, except for the impacts of hurricanes, tornadoes, and other natural disasters. ASCE’s advocacy lacked coordination.
“We had a lot to say about a lot of things, and it should have been part of public policy,” said ASCE 2023 President Maria C. Lehman, P.E., ENV SP, F.ASCE, a member of the Society’s Board of Direction from 1993-96. “We kind of morphed into the need to get involved in public outreach based on already starting to see that we needed to get more people into the profession.”
It could be said ASCE’s 1998 Report Card for America's Infrastructure changed all that, affirmed when then-President Bill Clinton took notice, citing ASCE by name and referring to its failing grade for schools, leveraging it to advance a call for greater investment. Even more, the report card established civil engineers in the public’s mind as infrastructure’s trusted stewards with credibility on the subject. Fast forward to today, and the new eighth edition of the report card captured headlines March 25 by issuing an overall grade of C, the best score ever.
Further reading
- ASCE’s 2025 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure assigns an overall grade of C
- How ASCE’s infrastructure report card gets made
- Leveraging the report card as a resilience tool – before disaster strikes
With the release of the 2025 report card – and each garnering greater attention and influence – one would assume that the creators of that first edition felt confident of a positive reception, but that was hardly the case.
“There was tremendous anxiety over whether anyone (from the news media) would show up” to cover the news conference announcing that first report card, said Casey Dinges, managing director of ASCE government relations at the time.
C-SPAN attended and broadcast the event in its entirety from the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., where the 30-page photocopied and stapled report was issued. The report card assigned a stern D average for the nation’s infrastructure. The 10 categories’ grades ranged from no better than a C for mass transit to that F for schools.
“We're here today because we want to point out to you, to the American public, to anyone who will listen, why it is imperative that we devote substantially more attention to our nation's infrastructure than we are doing today,” said ASCE 1998 President Luther Graef in his opening. “Our infrastructure is in trouble and needs help. And it doesn't need help from just the professionals. It needs help from everyone, from the legislatures to the county officials to the average citizen. From all of us. It's time we all make some noise on this issue.”
It's a message that seems obvious now, and it connected. But as the report card was being conceived, it met with some resistance from civil engineers and from typically allied societies that opted not to associate with it.
“We were trying to figure out if we could make something that the public could understand, that policymakers could understand, and that the media could easily grasp,” Dinges said. From that he was presented the idea of revisiting a study issued a decade earlier, produced by a national council under a charter from Congress. Fragile Foundations: A Report on America’s Public Works was the first to use a report card format to evaluate public works, assigning grades to eight categories. It attracted some attention but failed to galvanize action. Yet the format still had merit.
However, “many didn’t like the idea of using grades. It took some selling; there was some pushback,” said Jane Howell, ASCE chief communications and strategy officer, who was then director of communications.
“Some engineers thought grades might trivialize their work. Other related societies thought it would be an indictment on our profession,” said Lehman, who chaired the public communications committee overseeing the report card. “We said, ‘We don't fund them, we just design them.’”
During the months of preparing that first report card and its categories, Lehman said there was a degree of “making it up as we were going along. We didn't have the format and the rigor and the process down as we do now.” But they were guided by the principle “if you can't measure it, you can't manage it.”
“It was an out-of-the-box success from the first time we did it,” silencing the naysayers, Howell said.
Beyond C-SPAN, news media around the country covered the report. Regional outlets often explored local implications with a focus on the condition of area schools, given the F grade. In other parts of the country, news media reported on the condition of local dams, which received a D. After Clinton quoted the report card, lawmakers and administrators nationwide followed suit.
When it became apparent that there would be a follow-up, the question turned to when. “We decided on every four years because there isn’t enough change from year to year. We rely on a lot of government datasets that are not always available, plus it is a lot of work,” Howell said.
Four years also seemed a good interval for raising awareness, plus scheduling the release in the early weeks of a new presidential term maximized impact. And over time, media began citing the grades so frequently it gave many the impression the report card was released annually, Dinges said.
After the second report card in 2001, a new focus group for ASCE revealed the report card had “moved the needle, people knew civil engineers did infrastructure,” Howell said. As a result, the ASCE board established an ambitious new goal for report cards, placing infrastructure renewal on the same level as health care and Social Security, she said.
To Dinges, the 2021 passage of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, following release of that year’s report card, was the culmination of that mission, and of the entire previous 23 years and seven report cards. “We achieved tremendous notoriety for ASCE and civil engineers as not just technical experts but also public policy advocates and influencers,” he said. “I commend ASCE for its diligence and patience.”
The enormous success of the report card in the face of opposition offers a lesson, Howell said. “We successfully set out what wanted to accomplish. The fear was civil engineers would be blamed, but we have been seen as credible experts.
“You have to get out of your comfort zone to move things forward.”
