RESTON, VA—As the Trump administration began stepping up its $1-trillion infrastructure push, the American Society of Civil Engineers on Thursday issued its latest report card on the nation's public works. The overall grade of D+ was unchanged from four years ago, although it represented a slight improvement from 2009.

The society began issuing its American Infrastructure Report Card every four years in 1998, as a follow-up to the Fragile Foundations report issued a decade earlier. “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,” according to the ASCE. “In each of ASCE's six Report Cards, the Society found that these same problems persist. Our nation's infrastructure is aging, underperforming, and in need of sustained care and action.”

The ASCE would consider an overall grade of B to be acceptable in the long term. In order to achieve that level of improvement, the society estimates that $4.6 trillion would need to be spent over the next 10 years, more than four times the expenditure the White House is proposing.