Trying to politicize the I-35 bridge collapse is in poor taste on both sides.

The evidence suggests the bridge was simply misdesigned, with some of the steel structures too small to bear the load that was put on them, and to make matters worse, they added more concrete than the bridge originally carried, they increased the vehicle weight limits, and traffic on the bridge increased greatly. And some early signs of failure were not properly interpreted by inspection crews.

It's not like the bridge was uninspected, but rather the inspectors didn't see the problems for what they were. It's actually a fairly common problem even among the best and brightest engineers. Take NASA's Mars orbiter, the one that crashed into Mars after an engineer mistook English units for Metric. On the entire trip to Mars, NASA noted they needed to make substantial course corrections, much larger than they anticipated. But at the time, nobody thought to do a detailed investigation into WHY they were drifting so far off course, or they might have discovered that there was a serious mathematical error in their thrust calculations in time to successfully salvage the mission.

And inspection crews certainly weren't simulating the bridge nor were they performing detailed engineering analyses to determine if the specs on the original bridge were sufficient. Inspection crews don't go into that much detail. They look for visual problems and they simply failed to correctly identify warning signs of a potential collapse, even though they documented them photographically.

I don't think money played any substantial role at all. I mean, maybe if they were swimming in cash they might have replaced the bridge just because they had cash and wanted to spend it, but unless they did that, the inspections would have gone just as they did and the bridge would have collapsed just the same.