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A man fell on the subway tracks due to a brain tumor he never knew he had. After the surgery, he says his life is changed.

This is a guest post by Richard “Rich” Cooper, vice president of Research & Emerging Issues for the National Chamber Foundation (NCF), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s nonprofit think tank.

Last Friday, the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) budget ran out. The House of Representatives was supposed to pass new funding to satisfy ongoing essential FAA projects – like improved radar for managing Louisiana-Texas airspace or installing approach path indicator lights. Because of the ongoing Congressional battles on the debt ceiling and other matters, it failed to pass new funding and the FAA went into partial shutdown.  Last Saturday, 4,000 FAA employees were laid off, and construction projects to modernize numerous airports all came to a halt.

While the partial shutdown of the FAA shows the ramifications from a Washington standoff, it also speaks to the wider issue of how we think about infrastructure in this country. Airways, roads, bridges, rails and utilities are a part of America’s vast and impressive infrastructure, what has long been the gold standard for a developed, prosperous nation. Like all things, however, infrastructure requires updating and improvements, and for decades, leaders in the government (as well as the private sector) have been remiss in ignoring our national infrastructure needs.

That was the theme of a recent program hosted by the National Chamber Foundation, “Infrastructure: What We Want; What We Need.” The keynote speaker was retired Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, who talked about the importance of building resilience into our communities and infrastructure – lessons he learned firsthand while leading the response to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, as well as the BP oil spill. Also on the program was a group of panelists from the public and private sectors who raised points on American competitiveness and the need for public-private partnerships.

One key recommendation revealed by the panel is for state and local governments to work with the private sector to address infrastructure needs; this because additional funding isn’t going to come from Washington. Take President Barack Obama’s Monday night address to the country about the ongoing debt crisis. He warned that unless we address our growing national debt, America “won’t have enough money to make job-creating investments in things like…infrastructure.”

Too true. Yet, it’s not simply that we don’t have enough to pay for updating our critical infrastructure – it’s that, proportionally, we don’t dedicate enough funds to keeping our infrastructure up to date in the first place. The (unspoken) sentiment among the public and private sector experts at the event was that we are encountering an absence of leadership on this issue. There is a fundamental problem with the way our leaders view infrastructure – it is not as high a priority as it needs to be.

Further, there are not enough voices in the public and private sector making clear infrastructure’s central role in rebuilding America. Certainly there are a lot of loud voices inside the Washington Beltway, but are they clamoring for their party or their country’s needs?

Without a strong and up-to-date infrastructure, our economy will be hard-pressed to recover from the 2009 recession, compete with China, India and other countries, and build the kind of resilience into our infrastructure that will allow us to bounce back from disaster, whether natural or manmade. Absent that, we will see not just the partial shutdown of a federal agency but severe, long-term consequences for the entire country.