Biden Infrastructure Speech On ‘Build Back Better’ : NPR

The country’s infrastructure is badly in need of repair, both major parties agree. But for years they haven’t been able to agree on a proposal, or how to pay for it.

President Biden is set to detail a $2 trillion package on Wednesday afternoon that he is expected to say can be paid for in 15 years through raising taxes on corporations.

That is rankling Republicans, and the scope of the plan — and where the money would go — is sure to create even more controversy with the GOP. The bill has a heavy focus on climate change and the environment — including transitioning the auto sector from gasoline-based vehicles to electric, the creation of a Climate Conservation Corps and incentivizing private investments in wind and solar power.

Watch Biden’s remarks live from Pittsburgh at 4:20 p.m. ET.

The effort to encourage the transition from gas to electric vehicles alone would get more money — $174 billion — than the plan would spend on repairs to highways and bridges — about $115 billion.

“A transportation bill, I think, needs to be a transportation bill, not a Green New Deal,” Rep. Sam Graves, R-Mo., ranking Republican on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said during a recent hearing with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. “It needs to be about roads and bridges.”

Biden’s proposal includes $100 billion for expanding high-speed broadband, $100 billion for new school buildings and upgrades, and $100 billion for expansion of and improvements to power lines. It also has measures intended to fix racial injustices, like replacing all of the country’s lead pipes and service lines, and $105 billion for improving and expanding mass transit, as well as reconnecting neighborhoods that had been decimated and cut off from surrounding areas due to highway construction.

“It’s like a Trojan horse,” Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell told reporters in Kentucky on Wednesday. “It’s called infrastructure, but inside the Trojan horse it’s going to be more borrowed money, and massive tax increases on all the productive parts of our economy.”

McConnell said Biden called him Tuesday to talk about the plan — reportedly just the second time they’ve spoken since Biden was inaugurated.

It’s unclear how Democrats may seek to pass the proposal — if they’d try to get it through the Senate along party lines. For as many issues as Biden will have with Republicans in trying to get support for this bill, he also has to watch his left flank.

“It’s disappointing,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., told NPR’s Danielle Kurtzleben prior to the package’s unveiling. “The size of it is disappointing. It’s not enough.”

While she said she likes some of what’s in the bill, such as improving water supplies, she overall described the amount of money it would allocate as “papitas, little French fries. It’s nothing.”

Ocasio-Cortez believes, in fact, that as much as $10 trillion is not even that “progressive.” That’s a number several Democratic presidential primary candidates used for their infrastructure and climate change proposals. There is already a $10 trillion proposal put forward by Democratic Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Rep. Debbie Dingell of Michigan.

“I think it’s just the floor,” Ocasio-Cortez said, noting that this is a “planetary crisis, and we’re the richest country in the world.”

Labor leaders, who were crucial to helping Biden win the presidency, have largely come out in support of the bill.

“We are cognizant that workers will disproportionately suffer if we do not make the transition to a green economy in the right way,” United Auto Workers union President Rory Gamble said in a statement, adding, “We also need to ensure that this transition is stable, reliable and creates quality union wage jobs and flexible to market demand not relying on a one-size fits all solution.”

Terry O’Sullivan, head of the Laborers’ International Union of North America, praised the bill, saying it “will restore our economy and create hundreds of thousands of good union jobs.”

But he also noted: “We also look forward to working with the Administration on insisting that the renewable industry does not short-change and cheat working men and women of good family-supporting pay and benefits on the jobs building this infrastructure.”

NPR’s Scott Detrow, Don Gonyea and Danielle Kurtzleben contributed reporting.