The White House is apparently getting its infrastructure ideas from this Wall Street report

Published Tue, Apr 11 20174:02 PM EDT

President Donald Trump plans to spend $1 trillion on infrastructure over the next decade, but exactly what that will look like has yet to be revealed. However, Axios thinks the White House is looking for ideas in a recent UBS report. Trump met on Tuesday with around 20 executives of major companies like General Motors and IBM in an effort to ramp up support for the infrastructure initiative. According to Michael Allen of Axios , who has posted a number of scoops related to the Trump administration so far, the White house is reading a 41-page report from UBS entitled, "Revitalizing America: Engaging civic capital for US infrastructure," also released on Tuesday. Per the UBS report — written by Tom McLoughlin, Mike Ryan and Justin Waring of UBS — the No. 1 priority on the agenda is America's airports, followed by surface transportation, maritime ports and water utilities. The so-called digital divide and the smart grid also garner mentions. The authors stated that although 88 percent of commercial travelers pass through 60 of the busiest U.S. airports, these locations received only 27 percent of airport improvement grants in 2015. Trump had previously criticized several airports in the U.S. as "third world," saying during the first presidential debate, "You land at LaGuardia, you land at Kennedy, you land at LAX, you land at Newark, and you come in from Dubai and Qatar and you see these incredible [airports] — you come in from China, you see these incredible airports. ... We've become a third-world country." In October, a plane carrying then-vice presidential candidate Mike Pence slid off the runway at LaGuardia Airport. The report also called for a new approach to infrastructure, arguing that public funding would be insufficient for a complete overhaul and advocating for the incorporation of private funding and investors. "Many experts believe that public financing would only make up about one-third of the needed capital for a trillion-dollar package," the report stated. "But we can unlock private investment in infrastructure through creative approaches to public policy including, changes to our tax code and improvements to our regulatory and permitting process." "Private sector participation in U.S. airport operations is not a novel concept. Privately owned and operated airlines, after all, constitute a commercial airport's major source of revenue. Routine operations, ranging from jet fuel delivery to concessions to terminal maintenance, have been delegated to private companies for decades," the report added. McLoughlin, Ryan and Waring listed surface transportation as the second priority. "The system continues to allocate funding based on mode of transportation, allocating around four times more funding to highways than to mass transit," they wrote, noting the discrepancy as some 80 percent of Americans live in urban areas.

Construction work on a road reconstruction project.

Getty Images

Trump met on Tuesday with around 20 executives of major companies like General Motors and IBM in an effort to ramp up support for the infrastructure initiative.

According to Michael Allen of Axios, who has posted a number of scoops related to the Trump administration so far, the White house is reading a 41-page report from UBS entitled, "Revitalizing America: Engaging civic capital for US infrastructure," also released on Tuesday.

Per the UBS report — written by Tom McLoughlin, Mike Ryan and Justin Waring of UBS — the No. 1 priority on the agenda is America's airports, followed by surface transportation, maritime ports and water utilities. The so-called digital divide and the smart grid also garner mentions.