"Investing for Success", an article by Emilia Istrate and Robert Puentes, proposes a realignment of the federal capital budget by separating capital expenditures (funding for building infrastructure and projects) from other expenses-like operating and maintaining the infrastructure.
While the private sector and most US states employ some version of a capital budget, the US federal budget currently functions on a consolidated basis where capital and consumption expenditures (operations and maintenance) are commingled. This makes it doubly difficult to pin-down the true numbers for maintaining our infrastructure, much less building new projects.