H.R. 3963: Public Inspectors for Safe Infrastructure Act

H.R. 3963 would require that a federal, state, or local government employee do the construction inspection on federally funded highway projects. Private consultants could fill in only when an agency can't staff the work, and only temporarily.

The rule reaches more than a final walk-through. Inspection covers construction engineering, contract administration, on-site quality control, materials testing, and the resident engineer who decides whether a finished project is accepted or rejected. It applies to conventional contracts and to design-build and two-phase contracts, where one team handles both design and construction.

The exception is narrow. A state transportation department or local agency can hire a consultant only if it lacks "adequate existing or obtainable staff," and each consultant contract ends 12 months after it's awarded. The bill frames this as a bridge until the agency has its own people in place.

Any agency that uses the exception has to report to the Transportation Secretary at least once a year, describing every outsourced inspection job and justifying each one, and those reports go up on the Department of Transportation website. That gives the public, journalists, and legislators a running record of which agencies lean on contractors and why.

The bill doesn't include any funding. Agencies that rely heavily on consultants today would need to hire or train inspectors out of their existing budgets.