Breaking Down the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill

The $1.2 trillion package includes money for roads, rails, bridges, energy, broadband, and more.

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Good afternoon and welcome to the final week that infrastructure memes will be allowed. 

Team Uphill is anticipating a busy sprint to the end of the year between Democrats wrangling over the rest of President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda and next month’s debt ceiling deadline. In the meantime, inflation has hit Capitol complex restaurants, making it much more likely that we will be packing our own lunches for work. If you have any suggested go-to recipes, let us know in the comments. 

The House passed a $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package last week with a vote of 228-206. Most Democrats voted for the bill, alongside 13 Republicans. Six progressive Democrats opposed it. (A full breakdown of the tally is available here.) The legislation passed the Senate over the summer but stalled in the House, where progressives withheld their support as leverage in an effort to advance their priorities in the larger Build Back Better reconciliation bill. 

On Friday we brought you a detailed look at the climate provisions in Build Back Better. We thought we’d take a break from that today to look at some of the details of the bipartisan infrastructure bill now that it has passed. We’ll continue with another edition on the details of Build Back Better on Friday. 

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  1. Art

    Republicans in Congress should unanimously condemn Rep Paul Gosar for his disgusting anime video. This type of behavior should not be permitted by members of Congress from either party. It denigrates Congress.

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    Ben Connelly

    For lunch: buy carrots in bulk, apples in bulk, and almonds in bulk. Then fill up some bags of those and take them with you every day. No microwaves required. The carrots and apples will be super cheap if you get them in bulk.

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      Harvest Prude vertical-nib Author

      This is strong Ryan Brown energy! Unfortunately I require more bread than this.

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        Ryan Brown staff-badge Staff

        This is legit not far off from what I eat most days!

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    Denise Cote

    For lunch you can't do better than a fluffernutter. For the uninitiated, that's a peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwich. Doesn't need to be refrigerated (fluff will last beyond the apocalypse), pb provides protein, and you can make it healthy with wheat bread. You're welcome.

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  4. Paul A Sand

    Regrettable. From Cato (Billions and Billions to Be Wasted, https://www.cato.org/blog/billions-billions-be-wasted)

    "About half of the transportation dollars in the bill are dedicated to Amtrak and urban transit, modes of transportation that carry less than 1 percent of passenger travel and no freight. While the other half appears to be dedicated to highways, much of that will be spent on projects that will reduce, not maintain or increase, roadway capacities."


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    Earl King

    The biggest boondoggle is for high speed rail. Just look at CA's. It is absurd. I realize it is an initial stage to a supposed larger system but Merced to Fresno? The initial projection was $38 Billion, Now $100 Billion. Not all the line will be High Speed. To many crossings. I believe the Acela also isa bit of misnomer calling it a high speed line. Let's be honest any rail in a city will never be high speed unless it is underground. They should use Elon Musks tunnel boring system. Add in mountains, NIMBY, emanate domaine proceedings, delays, environmental impact, lawsuits and the costs will just continue to climb. There is also a supposed Mag Lev train, from the LA area to Las Vegas. Very high speed and I think most if not all of it underground or in some kind of tube. Anyway my point it is there are likely better uses for that money given our broken construction process. A) It should take 10 years to approve a new section of Freeway. B) Lawsuits the favorite weapon against infrastructure should have a new system. One Lawsuit. A Judge and take no more than a 6 mos process. Call it Construction court. Also it needs a non partisan engineering report. I mean seriously after 30 or 40 years and billions of dollars spent on Environmental impact reports don't we know by know what a new parking lot in a city will do to the Environment? Even the building of a new Freeway extension will have tons of data on. Part of the issue of no Nuclear in this proposal is the time wasted making the decisions and dozens of lawsuits attacking the project. How much of this money will be tied up in Lawsuits?

    Anyway I generally support doing this but it personally mean nothing to my life. Living in the pothole state....you cannot fix the roads in NJ. It only takes a few years for a new road to have potholes. Research on pothole elimination should have been a priority.

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      PaulH

      @Earl: One can debate how much of this infrastructure spending truly makes sense, but as you note, the biggest problem with infrastructure in this country is how long it takes to start a project and the ultimate construction costs (which are much higher in the US than in other developed countries). It is unfortunate that the Senate Republicans as part of lending bipartisan support for the bill did not demand that some attention be paid to those matters.

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      Kevin C. Smith

      I was about to say myself, "yay for the $$ on rail." Give me a friggin break. Dems whine that there isn't enough for lead pipes and then throw away that much on improving nationwide rail.

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    Dave Conant - MO

    "$4.7 billion will clean up and plug wells no longer utilized by the oil and gas industry." One wonders why general taxpayer money is being used for this instead of directly assessing oil and gas producers. That would be a step toward improving the environment and might even reduce borrowing a bit.

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      JohnF

      It's a complex issue. There are more than 3M "orphan" wells (wells where the owner(s) have gone bankrupt) out there Many of these wells are deteriorating and leaking Methane into the atmosphere. Most Oil-producing states have industry-funded programs to remedy this, but there aren't enough resources to address the backlog sufficiently. If these additional funds can accelerate the programs significantly, it will address an environmental issue, reduce GHG'S, and put a lot of oilfield workers back to work.
      Personally, I'd rather see this funded through an increase in the gas tax, but that would be visible to voters and would therefore be politically undesirable.

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        Dave Conant - MO

        I understand the problem as well as the benefits of remediation as quickly as possible. My preference is to see the producing companies pay to complete the extraction cycle by closing down the wells they opened and, because the 'orphans' were left by others in the industry, take financial responsibility for them as well. If that means the relevant states have to increase their assessments then so be it. I also understand the political power of the API which makes it unlikely that will happen. The BIF solution is probably the best available, it just doesn't make me happy.

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          JohnF

          I agree with you and it doesn't make me happy either. I doubt that it would have been possible to extract too much more money out of the producers over the last couple of years, but they should be profitable again now that prices have picked up.

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            Dave Conant - MO

            They still managed to eke out nice increases and bonuses for their management teams and Exxon cheerfully maintained their dividend despite book losses in a couple of quarters. I don't lose much sleep worrying about energy company profitability; I lose a lot more wondering when they'll be called to account.

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          Charlie Hall

          The oil and gas industry owns too many politicians. Just look at Alaska, where the Republican Party became a wholly owned subsidiary of Conoco-Phillips decades ago. Sarah Palin was a disrupter in that she was NOT owned by them, and look what happened to her.

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    Devin H

    This time of year for me it's chili season. Not sure your colleagues on the Hill will appreciate you for eating too much of it, though!

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  8. Karamzin

    This bill is really pretty good for an infastructure bill. It's probably full of pork and waste, but it is an infastructure bill.

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  9. learnin4life

    "According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the bill would add about $256 billion to the deficit over the next 10 years."

    A scary sounding number in isolation, but over a 10 year period this amount may rise to the level of a rounding error in terms of the total GDP. Not such a big deal when considered in relation to other even bigger government numbers.

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    Dpatricola

    "$100 million is included for the Bureau of Indian Affairs to relocate Indigenous communities that are at risk of climate concerns like sea-level rise."

    --I applaud the fact that this is an actual line-item but the amount seems paltry compared to everything else. What will this money actually cover? Moving whole communities? Their buildings? Paying for those who will lose their jobs?

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      JohnM.

      Pretty much the only Indigenous communities that this is targeted to will be Alaska native communities living near the ocean.

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