There are eight of them.
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.
THE AMERICAN PROSPECT
BY DAVID DAYEN
JUNE 14, 2021