While infrastructure funding has been demonstrably insufficient for a long time, it has rarely occasioned a deeply partisan rift in Congress. Generally, spending on infrastructure has been something that both sides of the aisle can agree upon, because what politician doesn’t want to see the potholes fixed in his or her home district? But these are not typical times. To many elected officials, the notion of bipartisanship has become a foreign concept, and everything has become a bone of contention – even those measures that plainly would serve the common good.
To be fair, even in less fractious times, Republicans probably would have balked at the price tag for Biden’s plan. And while the President anticipated that and put forward a proposal for how he would pay for his big ask (Biden wanted to raise more than $4 trillion in revenue by increasing the corporate tax rate, by taxing capital gains as ordinary income above $1 million, and by applying payroll tax to annual incomes over $400,000), Republicans stood on principle and boldly refused to consider hiking taxes – on the wealthy.
Given the political environment, too, there’s been an unabashed calculation on the part of Republican leadership not to risk giving the Democratic president a big win on a plan with such an ambitious scope and far-reaching impact. The next Congressional elections are just a year and a half away, and strategizing for that campaign has already begun.
But there were some Senate Republicans who were willing to deal, and so began the bipartisan slicing, dicing and spicing of an alternative piece of legislation that will allow at least some Republicans to vote for a more modest infrastructure bill. By the time you read this, Congress may finally have voted on the bipartisan infrastructure bill. The final cost has been bouncing around, but as of this writing, the bill has been shaved down to about a billion dollars. Nearly $600 million of that amount is new spending that will be devoted to transit, highways, bridges, and other public works projects.
Since we started out this article by talking about bridges, we’ll single out that number first: about $40 billion is being dedicated to bridge repair, rehabilitation and replacement in this budget. The White House points out that that’s the largest investment of federal dollars in bridges since the interstate highway system was built over half a century ago. But don’t forget – the ASCE calculated that it would cost more than twice that amount to do the job right.
Another $39 billion in the bill will be spent on modernizing public transit and bringing transit service to new communities. One notable green feature will be the replacement of thousands of old buses with zero emission vehicles and the electrification of America’s school bus fleet.
In addition to this bipartisan bill, Democratic leadership in Congress vows to come back to finish the job with a second bill that they’ll try to pass via the reconciliation process. This would handle Biden’s additional proposals supporting human infrastructure and climate provisions, including implementation of electric vehicle (EV) manufacture and infrastructure. The additional bill has no known Republican support so it would need to have all 50 Democratic Senators back the bill – which, as of this writing, is not yet the case.
Many of the items that will be funded by the infrastructure bill lie within the purview of the Department of Transportation
, which avows that its mission is “to ensure that America has the safest, most efficient and modern transportation system in the world” in order to improve the quality of life for all Americans in all communities, and increase the productivity and competitiveness of American workers and businesses.