Senate Set to Pass Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill Tuesday - WSJ
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
WASHINGTON—The Senate was set to pass a roughly $1 trillion infrastructure package with broad bipartisan support Tuesday, advancing a central piece of President Biden's economic agenda that would amount to one of the most substantial federal investments in roads, bridges and rail in decades.
The product of weeks of painstaking negotiations between a bipartisan group of 10 senators and the White House, the legislation would both reauthorize spending on existing federal public-works programs and pour an additional $550 billion into water projects, the electrical grid and safety efforts, among many other projects.
While lawmakers and presidents of both parties have said for years that they wanted to come together on a major package on infrastructure, an agreement consistently eluded them.
With expected passage in the Senate on Tuesday, Mr. Biden is poised to buck that trend, though the bill still faces a potentially rocky path in the House. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) has said the chamber won't take it up until the Senate also passes a separate $3.5 trillion antipoverty and climate plan, a challenging negotiation of its own that could take months.
Many senators cheered the legislation as a boon to the economy and as evidence that Republicans and Democrats can still work together on major legislation in Washington.
“It’s an issue where traditionally Republicans and Democrats have been able to come together and say, ‘We may disagree on taxes and healthcare and all sorts of other things, but on this issue of having strong infrastructure, we can come together,’” said Sen. Rob Portman (R., Ohio), the lead GOP negotiator of the deal.
Of that $550 billion in spending above previously projected federal levels, $110 billion will go toward roads and bridges, $66 billion to rail and nearly $40 billion to transit. A $65 billion infusion will fund an expansion of access to broadband, including by providing low-income households a $30 monthly voucher to pay for internet service.
The bill includes several measures aimed at avoiding the worst consequences of climate change, with $65 billion allocated for improving the electrical grid and energy production and nearly $50 billion set aside for making infrastructure more resilient to both cyberattacks and natural disasters like floods and wildfires. Roughly $7.5 billion is dedicated to building additional charging stations for electric vehicles, while another $7.5 billion would help fund swapping out current school buses and ferries with lower-emission replacements.
“This bill will rebuild crumbling roads and bridges and tunnels across the country, it will provide clean drinking water in American homes and address harmful contaminants, it will increase connectivity in our communities to bring broadband to even the most rural parts of our country,” said Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D., N.H.), one of the lawmakers who crafted the plan.
The exact infrastructure projects that the huge infusion of federal funds will benefit will largely be decided by states, according to Kevin DeGood, the director of infrastructure policy at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. That flexibility has drawn some criticism from progressives, who pushed for more stringent climate standards on the funds.
“What we would say is that this money doesn’t come with enough strings, it’s too much of a blank check to states and there’s a history that suggests they’re not great at making smart decisions with federal dollars,” Mr. DeGood said.
Republicans who opposed the bill cited its cost and its relationship to the rest of the Democratic agenda as reasons to oppose it.
R. Richard Geddes, the director of Cornell University’s Program in Infrastructure Policy, said the legislation could have included more provisions facilitating long-term private investments in infrastructure projects. Still, Mr. Geddes, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said the breadth of the investments would benefit the economy.
“It’s certainly historic in infrastructure terms; it’s at least a once-in-a-generation bill,” he said.
Negotiators struggled for weeks to agree on how to raise funds or find savings to cover the full cost of the package, a goal of both Republicans and Democrats in the talks. The White House ruled out raising the federal gas tax or other similar fees on those who use infrastructure, which have historically been sources of funds for infrastructure spending. At the same time, Republicans opposed Mr. Biden’s plan to raise corporate taxes to cover the cost.
To meet both those demands, the Republican and Democratic negotiators ultimately decided to rely on repurposing existing Covid-19 funds, delaying a Trump-era rule on Medicare rebates and receiving funds from past and future auction sales of wireless-spectrum space. A series of accounting maneuvers along with applying reporting requirements to cryptocurrency transactions are also meant to defray the bill’s overall cost.
The Congressional Budget Office, the legislative branch’s nonpartisan scorekeeping, found that lawmakers’ payment efforts ultimately came up short. The legislation will add $256 billion to the federal deficit over a decade, the CBO found.
The negotiators said they disagreed with the CBO’s methods for reaching that conclusion.
Agreeing to not raise taxes on businesses as part of this bill wasn’t the only concession Mr. Biden made during the talks. The White House originally sought a $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan in the spring, proposing major investments like $400 billion to cover in-home care for elderly and disabled Americans and $213 billion for retrofitting and building affordable housing that aren’t present in the bill.
Other White House initiatives, like spending $45 billion to replace lead pipes or $20 billion to reconnect neighborhoods cut off by past transportation projects, were slimmed down in the bipartisan bill. The legislation provides $15 billion for replacing lead pipes and $1 billion for the neighborhood program.
Democrats might pursue some of those left-out measures, like the care for elderly and disabled Americans and raising the corporate tax rate, in the separate $3.5 trillion package focused on antipoverty and climate programs. Democrats plan to approve that bill through a budget process called reconciliation, which would allow them to pass it without GOP support.
The looming prospect of the $3.5 trillion bill, the other major plank of Mr. Biden’s economic agenda, fueled both opposition and support for the infrastructure package. Some Republicans have said it has driven them to oppose the infrastructure bill, arguing that passing it will open the door to Democrats taking on the $3.5 trillion bill.
At the same time, some progressive Democrats who oppose elements of the infrastructure plan have said they would support it only if it enabled the party to move on to the $3.5 trillion bill.
While Mrs. Pelosi has said she would wait for the larger bill to pass the Senate, some moderate Democrats have demanded that the House take up the infrastructure bill as soon as possible, setting up a possibly contentious process in the House, where Republican support for the bill is less assured.
Still, the infrastructure bill has drawn a broad coalition of support both inside and outside the Capitol, including endorsements from major groups representing both business and labor.
Tags
Who is online
445 visitors
It's coming.
And behind it comes a "green new deal."
And that needs to be stopped in its tracks.
Deny them a Quorum?
Four of them have returned!
Always a possibility, however, "on February 24, 1988, in an attempt to establish a quorum on a campaign finance reform bill, Capitol police carried Oregon Republican Senator Robert Packwood into the chamber feet first at 1:17 a.m."
You think our infrastructure doesn't need fixing Vic?
The important and actual infrastructure appropriations are in the $1T bill. Green new Deal at $3.5T is feel good only pork and bullshit.
"Of that $550 billion in spending above previously projected federal levels, $110 billion will go toward roads and bridges, $66 billion to rail and nearly $40 billion to transit."
So... You think roads and bridges, rail, and transit aren't worth investing in? Maybe it's the good paying jobs. You don't want good paying jobs? Maybe you just want Biden to fail. Is that it?
I think you nailed it.
Like it or not, it is an eventuality ... resistance will prove to be futile.
The feeble minded 80 million never voted for Socialism.
The feeble minded 74 million voted for Trumpism.
That's all you have today?
Leave us alone if you can't be civil.
My apologies for ignoring the civility in your post at 1.3.1.
Practice what you preach, and maybe others might listen. Until then, you have no credibility on any level.
One big gripe I have about said package is that of the 14 Billion that the package that was allocated to Social Security, all of it was for administrative use. Not one penny went for increases in COLA for the retired and disabled!
Thank goodness since the super ignorant 74 million couldn't find socialism in a dictionary.
That's why we have the "hard core" scum on the left.
Vs the hard-core stupid on the right.
We can trade insults all day long, Kavika. I expect better from this forum.
Then you should stop insulting people. Are you capable of doing that or are you stuck in a never-ending circle of BS?
Then set the example Vic! You are engaging in insults yourself. So any calls for "civility" might not be taken seriously.
So do most of us. Soo...why can't you practice what you preach and the forum will be that much better.
Are you capable of doing that?
Are you? Why expect from others what you yourself are not willing to do? Clean up your own backyard before you complain about others backyards.
Is that what you do?
Nah....you see.....I don't expect from others what I am not willing to do myself. It's called respect of others. Do you have any of that? It doesn't sound like it. You're just here to stir your piles.
You started it Vic. When these threads turn into insults I usually just go elsewhere.
Too funny . You are preaching your sanctimonious bs but admit you don’t practice it yourself.
Hillarious
Ok, so the $1 trillion dollar bill has passed the Senate. And the Democrats have immediately turned to their huge "human" infrastructure bill as promised.
I haven't had time to read thru what has been released so far but I do have a question. For a reconciliation bill, are there not rules for what can be included in said bill and how long these things can last? When Trump and the Senate passed his tax reform bill thru reconciliation there were pieces of it that had to end at a specific time which is why there was so much bitching over the tax reduction for the lower tax payers but it was determined that their tax breaks could not exceed a ten year period thru reconciliation.
I see where a group of 9 moderate Democrats in the House have sent a letter to Pelosi demanding she bring the bi-partisan infrastructure bill to a vote now and not wait for the upcoming reconciliation bill. In the letter they threaten
Kind of wish I were a fly on the wall to listen in on what is sure to be a spirited discussion between the moderate democrats, the progressive democrats who are saying they will not vote for the bipartisan bill unless the Senate passes the budget resolution and both bills are brought together in the House for voting, and House leadership. Wonder how this will all turn out, what threats will be made and what promises will be offered.