Jose Luis Magana/AP Photo
President Biden walks with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi on Capitol Hill Thursday during a visit to meet with House Democrats.
In Congress, a “Christmas tree” refers to a bill that ends up weighted down by a lot of extra provisions (or “ornaments”), because lawmakers know that legislation is getting to the president’s desk, and they can hitch a ride for their pet project. Reading the text of the Build Back Better Act released by the House on Thursday, you can faintly hear caroling in the background as you look over its hundreds of investments, most of which few will ever hear about.
There’s a key difference on Build Back Better, however: Thanks to the Manchin Sinematic Universe, the bill had an effective cap on spending. It was like pulling teeth to get them up from $1.5 trillion to $1.75 trillion. So each ornament on the Christmas tree takes away money that could have gone to the main priorities, all of which got cut back, either in spending allocation or means testing or the timing of the expiration date.
This added up to quite a bit. There’s a line item in the framework summary released by the White House for “equity and other investments” at $90 billion. Using the word “equity” is certainly a way to make that section critic-proof, but after reading the bill (this section-by-section is very useful), it’s clear that only a share of that actually goes to something you can phrase that way. The $112 million for teacher residency programs, or the $325 million for Health and Human Services Department surveys, or the $35 million to boost small-business federal contractors who happen to be veterans do not fit that category.
All of these investments may be worthwhile, some of them very worthwhile. The bill authorizes $1 billion for the antitrust agencies, and another $500 million for the Federal Trade Commission to create a Bureau of Privacy. I’m enthusiastic about that, as well as a number of other measures. I like $1 billion for Pacific salmon restoration and $1.2 billion for marine fisheries as much as the next guy.
Each ornament on the Christmas tree takes away money that could have gone to the main priorities, all of which got cut back.
But there are other Christmas trees out there. The National Defense Authorization Act, for example, is one of the few bills that passes like clockwork every year. Some of this $90 billion bucket could have gone to that. And the appropriations package for this fiscal year isn’t done either. Yes, both of those bills require 60 votes, but I don’t think $2.2 billion in farm loan assistance or $1.4 billion in rural development grants, for example, would blow up a bipartisan appropriations package.
It’s hard to say exactly how many of these projects could have gone elsewhere. There are projects in the workforce training bucket that could have easily passed elsewhere, along with hard-infrastructure projects that had no problem sailing through in similar form in the bipartisan infrastructure bill. But using $90 billion as a rough figure, the cost of putting them in here is real.
For example, pandemic preparedness fits directly with the spirit of Build Back Better; we obviously need to be more prepared for a public-health emergency. The White House first asked for $30 billion, then $15 billion. They got $10 billion, most of it toward broader public-health system strengthening. Why come up short, when we’re still in a pandemic with 1,000 Americans dying every day? The maximum Pell grant was increased a paltry $550 per year; this was the replacement for tuition-free community college, and plenty more could have been added to that figure. A big equity piece was extending Supplemental Security Income to the territories, but to save money, it doesn’t start until 2024. That could have been made immediate.
And then you have big priorities like free universal pre-kindergarten and subsidized child care, which last six years. Anything that helps get those through the ten-year budget window, and therefore made permanent, would be critical.
(Nancy Pelosi is pushing for something she can call drug pricing reform in negotiations with pro-pharma holdouts, which would allow negotiation on off-patent drugs, claw back price increases above the level of inflation, and cap out-of-pocket costs for seniors. It’s modest but could yield $200 billion or more in federal savings. All of that should be plowed into making pre-K and child care permanent; it cannot just be used to reduce the deficit.)
When the bill got cut in half, committee wish lists should have been pared back much more sharply.
So how did this happen? Well, the bill was constructed by letting each committee in the House take a piece, with a budget allocation. This was back when the topline number was $3.5 trillion, and committee chairs had a bounty of funds to empty their wish lists into the bill. That’s fine, but when the bill got cut in half, those wish lists should have been pared back much more sharply. Instead, the big-ticket items took the brunt of the pain, and now we don’t have enough money for at-home care or housing, and a measly one-year extension of the Child Tax Credit.
The process wasn’t all bad. One major unheralded victory was the inclusion, for the first time ever, of fines for employers for unfair labor practices during unionization drives, up to $100,000 per infraction. This was part of the PRO Act and will be the first deterrent to union busting put into law since the 1930s. Fines were increased more than tenfold for violations of workplace safety and Fair Labor Standards Act laws, too.
The education title makes “Dreamer” recipients of the DACA program, as well as those in the U.S. on Temporary Protected Status, eligible for higher-education financial aid. Dental and vision coverage may have been taken out of Medicare, but they did, along with hearing, become mandatory benefits in Medicaid; previously, this varied from state to state. And the Natural Resources title might be my favorite. It included several revenue-raising items like enabling leases for offshore wind, increasing royalty rates on oil and gas leases, adding inspection and severance fees, and charging companies for idled wells. But it also shrank the oil and gas and coal lease times, banned drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the entire Outer Continental Shelf, and closed a loophole on “noncompetitive” bidding for public-land drilling.
There were also a number of places where committees boosted the threadbare funding in the bipartisan infrastructure bill for key measures. There are billions for cleaning up ports and clean-vehicle procurement (including the postal fleet). Another $9.225 billion goes to lead pipe and water service line remediation; there wasn’t enough of this in the infrastructure bill, and now they can get closer to full replacement. High-speed rail, which was cut out of the bipartisan bill, gets $10 billion.
But the Christmas tree nature also hides boondoggles. A $3 billion loan program for advanced technology vehicle manufacturing allows for funding of “hyperloop technology,” an unproven Elon Musk flight of fancy involving underground tunnels and vacuum tubes. It’s not a serious transportation solution, and yet there it is, eligible for federal loans.
I could tell you about a lot more: $3.2 billion for disposing hazardous materials, a substantial child nutrition piece, a permanent increase in Medicaid funding for territories. But when you have artificial scarcity, as you do on this bill, you have to question running in a hundred different directions rather than creating something simple, universal, and permanent.
