President Donald Trump said he is setting up a new council to help managers of infrastructure projects “navigate the bureaucratic maze” of federal regulatory reviews and permitting, wrapping up what his administration had called “infrastructure week.” The council will ensure that any federal agency that consistently delays projects by missing deadlines will face “tough, new penalties,” Trump said during a speech at the U.S. Department of Transportation. The event was meant to highlight the administration’s efforts to streamline approvals for public-works projects as part of the president’s $1 trillion infrastructure plan. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and other administration officials also held a round table with state officials before Trump’s speech. “My administration is committed to ending these terrible delays once and for all,” Trump said in prepared remarks. White House officials have said they hope to decrease wait times on building new roads, bridges and other projects from 10 years or more to two or less. “The excruciating wait time for permitting has inflicted enormous financial pain on cities and states—and has blocked many important projects from ever getting off the ground,” Trump said. The new council will create an online dashboard to track the progress of major projects, the president said. Former President Barack Obama had created a similar dashboard. Trump also said a new White House office will help streamline procedures for environmental reviews and required permitting, similar to something he called for in an executive order he issued after taking office. Trump’s Week Trump has tried to focus attention on infrastructure during a week dominated by the Senate testimony of fired FBI director James Comey. Besides today’s event, he endorsed turning the U.S. air-traffic control system over to a private, non-profit corporation, gave a speech in Ohio on Wednesday, and invited governors and mayors to the White House on Thursday for a “listening session.’’ But the administration didn’t release many more specifics this week about how it plans to fund $200 billion in direct federal spending over 10 years to leverage at least $800 billion in spending by states, localities and the private sector with incentives and other inducements. The White House posted a fact sheet on Thursday showing that of the $200 billion in federal spending, $25 billion would go for rural infrastructure, $15 billion for “transformative projects,” and $100 billion for “local prioritization of infrastructure needs.” It offered no other details, including plans for the remaining $60 billion, but said the numbers are preliminary and subject to negotiation. Trump is calling on Democrats to join Republicans in supporting an infrastructure plan, and Vice President Mike Pence told governors and mayors on Thursday that “rebuilding America is a bipartisan enterprise.’’ But Democrats have been openly hostile to the outline of Trump’s plan. ‘Bridge to Nowhere’ Of the eight governors and nine mayors on the list of attendees at Thursday’s listening session, only one—Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther—was a Democrat. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, who once talked about working with Trump, now calls the plan a “bridge to nowhere.’’ There has been bipartisan support for the idea of reducing the bureaucracy in environmental reviews and permitting that slows down and even scuttles projects. “If you said to a state, ‘Hey, instead of a dollar of federal funding with all the regulations that come with it, we’ll give you 80 cents, which would you take?’ the states would all take the 80 cents and skip the regulations because they could get projects done better, faster for our citizens,’’ North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, a Republican, told reporters at the White House on Thursday. Besides the executive order Trump signed to expedite environmental reviews and approvals for high-priority infrastructure projects, in March the White House officials convened a working group of federal agencies to target policies, regulations and statutes. Lengthy Reviews During an April 4 event with chief executives in Washington, DJ Gribbin, special assistant to the president for infrastructure policy, showed a large flow-chart detailing what can be a 10- to 20-year process to get approvals for a federal highway with hundreds of permits from 17 agencies. That chart was displayed at Friday’s event at the Department of Transportation. Speeding up reviews and permits is particularly important for private-sector investors, who have available capital but lack enough projects and certainty about deals, Chao has said. The infrastructure fact sheet the administration released with its budget on May 23 calls for designating a single federal entity to shepherd each project through the review and permitting process instead of navigating multiple agencies, as well as shifting infrastructure permitting to state and local officials where appropriate. Even so, the past three presidents also focused on streamlining reviews, and a transportation bill enacted at the end of 2015 created a new council to require greater cooperation among decision-makers with a mechanism for tracking the progress on approvals for key projects. It’s unclear how much more can be done to accelerate approvals without changing the standards for review, and the federal government can’t control state and local approvals when they are needed for projects, officials have said. ‘Overwhelming Evidence’ “The overwhelming evidence shows that the causes of delay for these major projects are more often tied to local/state and project-specific factors, agency priorities, project funding levels, local opposition to a project, project complexity, or late changes in project scope,’’ John Porcari a former deputy U.S. transportation secretary and Maryland transportation chief and now president of U.S. advisory services at WSP Parsons Brinckerhoff, said in May 3 Senate committee testimony. Making significant changes without fully implementing process improvements in recent highway bills also can be counter-productive, Porcari said, citing a March 6 Department of Transportation Inspector General audit. Democrats have urged the administration to focus on the streamlining provisions that have already been approved but not yet fully implemented and said the problem is really a lack of direct federal spending for projects. “We cannot streamline our way out of a funding shortfall,’’ Oregon Representative Peter DeFazio, the top Democrat on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and Eleanor Holmes Norton, the ranking member on the subcommittee on highways, wrote to Chao in April.