There is a particular romance, in policy circles, around the idea of the moonshot. The grand initiative. The transformative project. It photographs well and it polls well, and for those reasons it tends to crowd out a far more important conversation about the unglamorous work of maintenance.

Bridges do not fail because we lacked vision. They fail because we deferred small repairs until they became large ones. The same logic applies to the electrical grid, to municipal water systems, to the thousands of culverts that keep highways from washing out in heavy rain.