Biden Stares Down Long Summer of Infrastructure Haggling

(CN) — Renewing his campaign promise to put more federal dollars into education, climate and child care, President Joe Biden emphasized in a speech Wednesday that he is not giving up on issues that failed to gain significant traction in infrastructure framework approved last month by Congress.

“To truly win the 21st century and lead the world, to truly build an economy from the bottom up and middle up, to truly deal everybody in this time, we need to invest in our people,” said Biden, speaking from McHenry County College in Crystal Lake, Illinois, which boasts a child care center on site.

Combining the administration’s American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan, the president said the nation’s next infrastructure plan should include free universal pre-K, two years of free community college, an increase in Pell grants for students who need financial aid, and a comprehensive paid family and medical leave initiative that offers Americans a total of 12 weeks of paid leave annually for parental, family care or personal illness, plus three days of bereavement leave.

The next round of investments will also feature funding for workforce training programs, including in sectors for public health, manufacturing and technology and clean energy.

Biden's “Build Back Better” plan also promises parents up to $8,000 in tax credits to cover child care expenses, and it would it extend the Child Tax Credit that already made it into the American Rescue Plan. That program offered $3,600 for each child under 6 and $3,000 for each child between 6 and 17.

“It’s not a credit against your taxes, you’ll get cash. Cash,” Biden said. “You get the first half of $3,600 paid out between July and December, and you get the rest between January and Tax Day.”

The first tax credits could go out by the end of this month.

Less than a week ago, the House of Representatives approved $715 billion for a surface-transportation bill, legislation that would pour more than $340 billion into roads and bridges and another $100 billion into public transit. An excess of $160 billion is flagged for drinking water and wastewater infrastructure in the proposal, but what was omitted were key planks of the president’s “Build Back Better” platform.

Those omissions in the package — which is expected to serve as a baseline for negotiations in the Senate later this summer — included affordable child and elder care programs, the expansion of free meals to more than 9 million school children, free education, a reduction in health insurance premiums, and funding to tackle the climate crisis. As the nation watched some of the very infrastructure the White House wants to improve buckle under a dayslong crippling heat wave in the Pacific Northwest, the latter issue has once again come under keen focus.

Notably, the House-backed package includes ambitious climate investments, like $8 billion earmarked just for greenhouse gas emission control, $4 billion for electric vehicle charging stations, and a little over $6 billion to make some of the nation’s existing infrastructure more resilient to increased flooding events and extreme heat.

The Biden administration has already proposed spending a total of $4 trillion to uplift the middle class, improve ailing infrastructure, create jobs and at its bottom line, give the pandemic-weary economy a real jolt in the right direction.

But matching these ambitions to reality in Congress will be no easy feat. Just two Republicans voted in favor of spending $715 billion on Biden’s deal in the House. That package must also be married or blended with a proposal by a bipartisan group of senators who met with Biden in June.

The Senate framework agreed upon was broad but cobbled together $1.2 trillion to refurbish the national infrastructure. About $579 billion spread over eight years would go toward traditional roads and bridges repair. The Senate proposal also featured some of Biden’s climate requests, including $7.5 billion for electric vehicle charging stations, but about $50 billion is flagged generically for resiliency initiatives tackling climate change.

To pay for this, there would be a $40 billion check cut to the enforcement arm of the Internal Revenue Service. With that investment, the White House has said the IRS could proactively rake in an excess of $140 billion in unpaid taxes. Pandemic stimulus funding that went unspent will also be tapped.

Senate Democrats are gunning for support of at least 60 lawmakers to get a deal done. A vote could come in August or early fall. With Republicans grousing, however, over the administration’s approach to climate, child care, education, health care — what the president has collectively dubbed “human infrastructure” — it is expected that a procedural process known as reconciliation will have to be tapped by Democrats who wish to wait no longer for compromise.

“With a filibuster, our friends on the other side use this constantly, it means you have to get 60 votes to get anything done. And we’re a 50-50 Senate with a vice president who happens to be a Democrat,” Biden remarked Wednesday to the large crowd gathered at the community college in Lake Crystal.

He added with a laugh: “God willing, we’re not going to have 40 weeks of ‘This is Infrastructure Week.'”

References to “Infrastructure Week” were a regular theme of Biden's predecessor in the White House, but time and again plans would go up in a spectacular puff of smoke. One of the more notable dust-ups over infrastructure involved then-President Trump hauling House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and then-Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to the White House to talk numbers. But it wasn’t infrastructure numbers Trump was interested in.

Trump turned the meeting about the nation’s roads and bridges into a session about then-special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigations. Over four years, no sweeping infrastructure bill ever came to pass under Trump.

Though there’s a new Congress and executive branch, much of the political divisiveness among Republicans and Democrats is still very much the same in the House and Senate. This could endanger Biden’s ambitious proposals since both the infrastructure bill and the reconciliation bill will require intense legislation dependent on compromise and mutual effort. At least two Democrats, Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have already indicated for weeks they may not join members of their party.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters 24 hours before Biden’s speech at a press conference in Kentucky: “This is going to be a hell of a fight over what this country ought to look like in the future and its all going to unfold here in the next few weeks. I don’t think we have had a bigger difference of opinion between the two parties over the best thing to do for America than we have right now.”

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