Dear Chairman Graves, Ranking Member Larsen, Chairman Perry, Ranking Member Titus,

As Congress considers a wide range of ideas to promote US national and economic security by ensuring critical investment into America’s rural, urban, and under-invested communities, we are writing to support the inclusion of proposed Economic Development Act (EDA) Reauthorization provisions in this year’s NDAA.

We commend this bipartisan effort to renovate EDA tools to help under-served communities thrive and build resilient local and rural economies. These provisions include important changes for capacity-building along with project predevelopment and critical supply chain development grants for rural and exurban areas. The inclusion of Section 5105 emphasizes the need to provide support for administrative expenses that so often hinder predevelopment progress. Additionally, Section 5115 authorities, first outlined by Senators Mark Kelly, JD Vance, and Tom Cotton in the bipartisan Opportunities for Non-developed Sites to Have Opportunities to be Rehabilitated for Economic Development (ONSHORE) Act of 2023, stress the importance of predevelopment to help jumpstart new projects and manufacturing.

As noted in earlier EDA reauthorization testimony before your Committee, EDA’s project predevelopment funding efforts are among the most catalytic sources of federal investment, leveraging $16 in non-federal funding for every $1 of early EDA project support. If we are going to build next-generation, public-private partnerships and close a projected $27 trillion funding gap by 2050, updating EDA tools and authorities to help rural, urban, and tribal communities develop shovel-worthy and investment-ready project pipelines along with critical supply chain and manufacturing offers solid bang for the buck.

Trillions of dollars in sidelined private capital could move into high-impact infrastructure projects if the federal government addresses the local capacity and innovation barriers currently impeding economic development and infrastructure. This bottom-up shift cannot happen without a series of additive capacity and performance-based investments made now. To catalyze this process, Congress should provide predevelopment investment to accelerate the realization of the nation’s pipeline of investment-ready infrastructure projects.

We look forward to seeing this bipartisan effort pass in Congress by the end of the year to strengthen American communities to drive project pipelines and partnerships from the bottom up.

Sincerely,

Dan Carol
Senior Director
Milken Institute Finance