The Washington Post reports on a Labor Department decision that applies pro-union Davis-Bacon rules to the CityCenter development in Washington D.C. The ruling could push up costs on the project by $20 million by forcing firms to pay artificially high wages.

The paper says that “area real estate developers and construction executives who have partnered with the District say the ruling, if upheld, is likely to inflate costs on a wide range of projects by as much as 15 percent.” In turn, that could have “unprecedented, significant [and] adverse citywide cost impact upon every economic development project in the District’s portfolio,” said a deputy mayor of the city. So while Democrats in Congress are demanding government action to fix the nation’s supposedly crumbling infrastructure, here the Obama administration has thrown up a new hurdle to investment.

Davis-Bacon rules usually apply to federally funded construction, thus pushing up the costs of public projects. Nationwide, economists at the Beacon Hill Institute found that Davis-Bacon rules cost federal taxpayers about $9 billion annually. For example, repairs to National Park facilities cost more than they should, thus reducing the amount of maintenance the agency can do within its budget. However, the D.C. ruling stretches the Davis-Bacon rules even further because CityCenter is a privately funded project.

In an essay at www.DownsizingGovernment.org, economist Charles Baird notes that passage of Davis-Bacon in 1931 was motivated by the faulty economic idea that the government should try to keep wages high during an economic downturn. But Baird describes another reason why Davis-Bacon was misguided from the start—the racist intentions of the bill’s supporters:

Congress wanted to keep black workers from competing for jobs that had hitherto been done by white unionized labor. The racist motivation behind the legislation is plain when reading the Congressional Record of the debate in 1931.