Bill Hagerty Jobs Cost of Living Tennessee

Bill Hagerty Wrote a Bill to Fix America's Bridges. Then He Stalled the Senate for a Weekend and Voted Against the Law That Funded It.

In May 2021 Hagerty introduced a bipartisan $3.265 billion bridge repair program, citing Memphis's shut-down I-40 bridge. That exact program went into the infrastructure law — and in August he ground the Senate to a halt to delay it, then voted no.

MAGA Report Cards · Aug 10, 2026

In May 2021, a bridge over the Mississippi River nearly fell down.

Inspectors found a crack in a critical steel support beam on the Interstate 40 Hernando de Soto Bridge at Memphis. They called 911. The bridge shut down completely — about 45,000 vehicles a day, roughly 30 percent of them commercial trucks, suddenly had nowhere to go. It stayed closed for almost three months. Investigators later found the crack had been visible in a kayaker's photograph since 2016, missed by inspection after inspection.

Two weeks after that bridge closed, Bill Hagerty did something genuinely good. He introduced a bill to fix bridges.

Eleven weeks after that, he shut down the United States Senate to delay the law that paid for it — and then voted against it.

This is the whole story, in order.

May 25, 2021: he introduces the bridge bill

Hagerty joined a bipartisan group of senators, led with Democrat Sherrod Brown of Ohio, to introduce the Bridge Investment Act. It created a competitive grant program to repair and replace deficient bridges and chip away at the national backlog of bridge repairs. It required American-made steel and iron in the projects it funded.

The price tag: $3.265 billion.

In the announcement, Hagerty pointed directly at what was happening back home:

"Tennesseans, particularly those in Memphis and the Mid-South, know all too well right now the necessity of maintaining our bridges..."

He was right. He named the ongoing I-40 closure as the reason the country needed to invest in its bridges. It's hard to argue with a senator making that case while a major river crossing sits closed in his own state.

August 2021: the bridge program goes into the infrastructure bill

Here's what happened to Hagerty's idea. It didn't die in committee. It didn't get watered down. It got written into the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill essentially whole.

Go read the law. Section 11118 of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is titled "Bridge investment program." The law authorizes it at $600 million for 2022, $640 million for 2023, $650 million for 2024, $675 million for 2025, and $700 million for 2026.

Add those up: $3.265 billion — the exact figure from Hagerty's own press release.

His bill's program. His bill's number. Sitting in the law.

August 7–9, 2021: he grinds the Senate to a halt

The bill was headed for passage. More than a dozen Republicans had joined Democrats to clear the early hurdles. And then one freshman senator decided nobody was going anywhere.

The Associated Press described what he did: Hagerty "spent the weekend using a procedural maneuver to essentially grind the chamber to a halt." A final vote that could have happened days earlier was pushed toward the early hours of Tuesday morning. Senators lost a second straight summer weekend to it.

On August 7, he took the floor and laid out his objections: the bill wasn't really paid for, it was "a 2700-page bill going through no committees," and Democrats would hold it hostage in the House until a separate "multi-trillion-dollar socialist bill" passed.

His colleagues in both parties were not impressed.

Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota: "We have squandered not minutes, not hours, but several days."

Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah: "Criticism is expected. And, I note, criticism is also pretty easy. If you don't like this bill, what bill do you like instead? What would you do instead?"

Democratic Sen. Jon Tester of Montana, one of the lead negotiators, was blunter: "I think he's doing Trump's bidding. I don't think there's any doubt about it."

Tester wasn't guessing. According to the AP, Trump called Hagerty that Sunday morning. Later the same day Trump put out a statement egging him on: "Congratulations to Senator Bill Hagerty in remaining true to 'AMERICA FIRST!'"

Meanwhile, about 8 in 10 Americans supported spending more on roads, bridges, ports, and drinking water pipes, according to an AP-NORC poll taken at the time.

August 10, 2021: he votes no

The bill passed anyway, 69 to 30. Hagerty voted no.

So did his Tennessee colleague Marsha Blackburn.

Both of Tennessee's senators voted against the largest bridge investment since the interstate highway system was built — including the bridge program one of them wrote.

What Tennessee got anyway

The money came to Tennessee regardless, because that's how formula funding works. Tennessee was allocated $302 million for bridges over five years under the law's Bridge Formula Program, Nashville's Fox 17 reported in January 2022 — for a state with roughly 880 bridges rated in poor condition.

Tennessee also got $813 million from the law's broadband program to extend high-speed internet to every remaining unserved home and business in the state by 2028.

None of that happened because of Bill Hagerty. It happened over his objection, after he'd spent a weekend making sure it took longer.

The part that doesn't add up

A senator can vote against a big bill and still be honest about it. Plenty of Republicans thought the price tag was too high and said so once, on the record, and moved on.

That's not what happened here.

Hagerty didn't just object. He looked at a shut-down bridge in Memphis, wrote a $3.265 billion program to fix bridges like it, watched Congress adopt his program word for word — and then used the Senate's rules to personally delay the vote, at the urging of a president who wanted the whole thing dead, before voting against his own idea.

His stated reason was the deficit: he cited a CBO estimate that the bill would add about $256 billion over a decade. It's a real number, and reasonable people can care about it.

But watch what that principle does four years later. On July 1, 2025, Hagerty voted to pass Trump's budget bill — the one that cut health coverage and food aid to help pay for tax cuts, and added trillions to the debt doing it. The national debt has since climbed to about $39.9 trillion, roughly $3.9 trillion higher than when Republicans took full control.

So the deficit was worth shutting down the Senate over when the money was for bridges. It wasn't worth a single procedural objection when the money was for tax cuts.

Tennessee has 880 bridges in poor condition. One of them nearly collapsed into the Mississippi River with people driving over it. Hagerty knew that better than almost anyone in the Senate — he said so himself, in writing, in May 2021.

Then in August he made everyone wait, and voted no.