A group of Republican senators unveiled a new infrastructure package on Thursday, a counter-proposal to President Joe Biden’s broad-reaching $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan.
The $568 billion proposal, introduced by GOP Sens. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), Roger Wicker (R-MS), Pat Toomey (R-PA), and John Barrasso (R-WY), is only a fraction of the funding included in the Biden administration’s drafted legislation, and covers more traditional infrastructure than in the White House’s jobs plan.
“Our focus today is to say what our concepts are as Republicans, what infrastructure means, what our principles are in terms of pay-fors, and to say to President Biden and his team and our Democrat colleagues: ‘We’re ready to sit down and get to work on this,’” Sen. Moore Capito said on introducing the framework Thursday.
The funding would roll out over the course of the next five years, and is broken down into nine specific areas:
-
$299 billion for improving roads and bridges
-
$61 billion for upgrading public transit systems
-
$20 billion for railways
-
$35 billion for drinking water and wastewater treatment
-
$13 billion for motor vehicle, highway traffic, and pipeline and hazardous material safety
-
$17 billion for ports and inland waterways
-
$44 billion for the nation’s airports
-
$65 billion for broadband infrastructure, including “additional spending”
-
$14 billion for water storage facilities
Sen. Wicker said the package was a “very, very generous offer” in negotiations with Democratic colleagues and the administration.
“We take the part of the president’s plan that most Americans agree is real, hard infrastructure, we give it our touch and we think we have a very good number here,” Wicker added.
Sen. Moore Capito said she has already presented the framework to the White House, adding that she believes “it will get a response.”
Absent from the GOP proposal are some of the more progressive items included in Biden’s package, namely funds aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions and programs that would address racial inequity. Republicans have been critical of certain aspects of Biden’s proposal which they say are not traditional infrastructure. Biden’s plan includes funding for addressing racial injustice in highways, Medicaid expansion for caregivers and funding electric vehicle charging stations.
Biden’s proposal would largely be paid for, he says, by raising the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28% — a solution many fiscally conservative Republicans balked at, and which was not included in Thursday’s proposal.
Instead, the GOP senators hope to pay for their infrastructure plan through a number of different measures: First, by using some of the leftover money from the $350 billion allocated to states in the American Rescue Plan; second, by encouraging private sector businesses to invest in the project; and third, by enacting policies that would promote user fees on electric vehicles.
The White House has been open to suggestions from lawmakers on the proposed American Jobs Plan, having hosted a number of bipartisan meetings over the course of the past several weeks to hammer out the details of an infrastructure package.
Biden will continue hosting members of Congress over the coming weeks, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday, adding the administration sees the GOP counter-proposal as a “good faith effort,” and a starting point for negotiations.
“The President has said from the beginning that he would welcome any good faith effort to find common ground, because the only unacceptable step would be inaction,” Psaki said, later adding: “We’re looking forward to reviewing the details of the proposal. We would expect the next steps would be a full briefing and conversations on a staff level that will continue over the coming days, and an exchange of ideas from there.”
The White House is “very open to hearing a range of mechanisms” on how to pass a robust infrastructure package on a bipartisan basis, Psaki added.
Other members of the Biden administration agreed that while $568 billion is a good place to start, it likely won’t be nearly enough to meet all of the president’s priorities.
“If [Republicans] come forward with whatever the number is, six, seven, 800 billion, well, then that’s a starting point for further negotiation,” commerce secretary Gina Raimondo said in an interview with Politico on Wednesday.
More bluntly, she added: “Six hundred billion dollars is not what the country needs — the country needs $2 trillion. It’s not nearly enough.”
Capito, for her part, says she’s optimistic compromise can be reached: “I feel like the White House and other counterparts on the House side want to try to reach a consensus, hard infrastructure bill.”
