Bridge Inspection Backlogs Leave Thousands of Spans Uninspected Past Deadlines

Federal law requires most highway bridges to be inspected at least every 24 months, but state and local agencies routinely miss these deadlines. A 2023 Government Accountability Office report found that thousands of bridges had overdue inspections, with some states reporting inspection completion rates below 90%. The Federal Highway Administration identified recurring issues with inspection timeliness across multiple states. This matters because the entire bridge safety framework depends on inspections catching deterioration before it becomes dangerous. When inspections fall behind, defects go undetected. A bridge that was in fair condition two years ago may have developed serious corrosion, scour damage from flooding, or fatigue cracking in steel members. Without a timely inspection, nobody knows. The inspection is the only mechanism the system has for catching problems between the day a bridge is built and the day it fails. The downstream consequence is that weight restrictions, closures, and emergency repairs happen reactively instead of proactively. When a long-overdue inspection finally occurs and finds serious defects, the bridge may need to be immediately closed or weight-restricted, disrupting traffic with no warning. Proactive inspection would have caught the deterioration earlier, when repair was cheaper and closures could be planned. This problem persists because there are not enough qualified bridge inspectors. Bridge inspection requires specialized training and certification under the National Bridge Inspection Standards, and the work is physically demanding, often requiring climbing, rope access, or working over water. Many state DOTs struggle to recruit and retain inspectors because private-sector engineering jobs pay more and involve less fieldwork. Rural states with large bridge inventories are hit hardest. The structural root cause is that the federal government mandates inspections but does not fund them directly. States must pay for inspections out of their general transportation budgets, where inspection competes with construction, repaving, and other more politically visible activities. There is no dedicated federal funding stream for bridge inspection, and no meaningful enforcement mechanism when states miss deadlines beyond stern letters from FHWA.