Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA via AP Images
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) speaks to the press at the Capitol in Washington, June 9, 2021. Cassidy is part of a bipartisan group of senators who last week announced an infrastructure agreement.
As a new infrastructure week begins, we’ve reached the peak confusion stage in Washington. It is genuinely difficult to keep straight all the gangs, working groups, and bipartisan agreements on bills that fall under the rubric of infrastructure. So let this be a public service straightening all that out. There are actually eight infrastructure bills floating out there right now, though none of them appears at this moment to have the votes needed to pass into law. Walking through them can illuminate what the Biden administration’s strategy should be going forward.
First, you have the surface transportation bills, one each in the House and Senate. The House bill, called the INVEST in America Act, is a five-year, $547 billion package that passed the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee last Thursday along mostly party lines; just one Republican, Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), voted for it in committee. (The House passed largely the same bill last year; it didn’t go anywhere.) The Senate has its own surface transportation bill, which was introduced on a bipartisan basis in May by two Democratic and two Republican members of the Environment and Public Works Committee. That bill has $303.5 billion for highways, roads, and bridges; the House bill reserves $334.2 billion for that purpose.
It’s important to understand that these surface transportation bills represent no new federal spending on infrastructure; they are reauthorizations of the money Congress sends out to the states for infrastructure projects routinely. And it has to be reauthorized by September 30, or all federal spending on infrastructure would expire.
There’s a dedicated Highway Trust Fund, funded by the (inadequate) gas tax, that pays for this particular spending. Not a single dollar of the Biden infrastructure plan, which is intended to go on top of normal infrastructure spending, is contemplated in these bills. Sure, they set a baseline of spending, which could mean a higher or lower need for additional infrastructure dollars. But it’s really separate from the Biden plan. So when you hear about these “infrastructure bills” moving through Congress, understand that they aren’t, you know, the infrastructure bill that everyone has been talking about.
Next, we have the bipartisan gang bills. And there are two major gangs at the moment, once again separated by chamber. The so-called Problem Solvers Caucus, a 58-member group made up of equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans, announced a $1.25 trillion infrastructure framework agreement last week. Importantly, in order to pump up the number this framework includes the surface transportation bill being passed separately, which, again, isn’t new spending. So the new spending in this Problem Solvers bill is $761.8 billion over eight years.
The vast majority of this money goes to “hard” infrastructure projects like roads and bridges, mass transit, and airports and ports. There’s also $60 billion for drinking and wastewater; $45 billion for deploying broadband internet; $25 billion for electric-vehicle charging stations; $25 billion for electric-grid modernization; $25 billion for other energy options like nuclear, hydrogen, and carbon capture and storage; and $10 billion for veterans’ housing.
An agreement with 29 House Republicans might be formidable, but the group deferred the revenue side to later, which (as we’ll see) is the source of the entire disagreement between the parties. Also, the “agreement” wasn’t made between the entire caucus, but a smaller “working group” within it. So it’s unclear how much buy-in there will be on a full bill.
Meanwhile, on Friday a Senate gang of five Republicans and five Democrats announced their own agreement on “a realistic, compromise framework to modernize our nation’s infrastructure and energy technologies.” It’s also worth $1.2 trillion over eight years, but also folding in the surface transportation spending. According to its statement, only $579 billion would be new spending. There is as yet no breakdown of the spending side (though it’s all “traditional” infrastructure), and on revenue the gang has already ruled out any tax increases, which is how Biden proposed to fund the spending.
The revenue in the Senate gang proposal includes things the Biden administration already ruled out in previous negotiations, and other things that they most definitely should. It repurposes unused COVID relief funds, which the White House has said doesn’t interest them. It creates an undisclosed “free rider” fee for electric vehicle owners, which the White House may rule out because it would raise fees on people making under $400,000 a year. And it uses measures like an “infrastructure bank” to force states to borrow for projects, as well as public-private partnerships, a hallmark of Donald Trump’s never-realized infrastructure plans. Those should be avoided like the plague.
Then there’s the obvious point that the agreement includes five Republicans, when ten would be needed for passage. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) has said that’s gettable, but the Republican Senate leadership has said no way.
There’s an opportunity cost to the constant delay as a bipartisan package gets ironed out, with the rest of the agenda pushed to the side.
This leads us to the fifth infrastructure bill, a solo effort from the longest-serving House Republican, Alaska’s Don Young. Young, who previously chaired the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, sketched out a $1.25 trillion package with $750 billion in new spending, that would actually increase the corporate tax rate to 25 percent as part of the revenue, along with adjusting the gas tax to account for past inflation. This is rather remarkable, but there doesn’t appear to be much support for it outside of one Republican.
None of these, of course, comes even close to the amount of new spending contemplated in Biden’s two infrastructure packages, the American Jobs Plan ($2.2 trillion) and the American Families Plan ($1.8 trillion). Initial direct talks between the White House and Senate Republicans collapsed because that gap was so wide, even after Biden brought the new hard infrastructure spending down to $1 trillion. Also, the pay-fors were completely at odds, and nothing in these new packages, save for Don Young’s lone voice in the wilderness, gets us any closer to a compromise on that.
There’s this theory out there that Biden can pass some compromise package under regular order and then come back and pick up everything absent from that bill in a reconciliation package with only Democratic votes. In that sense, there may be no harm in letting the bipartisan talks play out. But those talks seem doomed to fail, most notably on the pay-for issue. And progressives are concerned that their priorities, especially on climate and on investments in family care, will be forgotten as soon as a bipartisan bill gets signed.
They’re right to think so. Moderate Democrats are already choking on tax increase proposals, and because Biden leashed himself to a deficit-neutral package, lower revenues mean some spending would have to get cut. Moderates may not want to do the climate or care-related spending if it’s unmoored from a traditional infrastructure bill, and climate in particular has become a progressive red line. Moreover, there’s an opportunity cost to the constant delay as a bipartisan package gets ironed out, with the rest of the agenda pushed to the side. That’s why not only progressive groups but senators like Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) are urging that Democrats go it alone.
If Democrats actually had 50 Senate votes for anything, they might be tempted to do so. But it’s unclear that Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) or Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), both part of the bipartisan Senate gang, would be willing at this point to abandon that process.
There’s actually an eighth infrastructure bill, and this one has passed the Senate already with 68 votes. The U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, popularly known as the “China bill,” includes several elements that were in Biden’s American Jobs Plan, in particular $50 billion for the domestic semiconductor industry and more funding for research and development. The bill weakened when it came into contact with the Senate, adding in parochial projects and funneling most of its money to existing R&D labs rather than creating new hubs at the National Science Foundation. House passage is not assured and will occasion more lobbying and negotiation.
The upshot here is that a popular bill to rebuild the country and force everyone, including large corporations and the wealthy, to pay their fair share doesn’t have the support needed right now to advance. When you have eight infrastructure bills, you really have zero. The surface transportation bills are just existing spending, which as we’ve seen is insufficient to dig us out of our deficiencies. The bipartisan gangs are underweight on spending and nowhere on revenue. The White House plan doesn’t have enough Democrats to move forward yet, and rests on some extremely dubious assumptions about a two-step process. Even a rather jingoistic effort to “keep up with China” isn’t assured of advancement.
Until this all gets unraveled, infrastructure week will keep going, and going, and going.
