In a statement issued on Saturday, the White House definitively walked back a suggestion by Joe Biden that he might veto a bipartisan agreement on infrastructure spending. Two days earlier, at a press conference to celebrate the deal, Biden had said that he wouldn’t sign the infrastructure package unless it were accompanied by a broader bill reflecting his other policy priorities. “That statement understandably upset some Republicans, who do not see the two plans as linked,” Biden said. “My comments also created the impression that I was issuing a veto threat on the very plan I had just agreed to, which was certainly not my intent. . . . The bottom line is this: I gave my word to support the Infrastructure Plan, and that’s what I intend to do.”
Biden was effectively admitting that he hasn’t completely left behind his decades-old tendency to let his verbosity get the better of him. In hailing the infrastructure deal, he could simply have restated his commitment to his broader spending proposals, which Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill intend to enact using the budget reconciliation process, requiring only fifty-one votes in the Senate. Still, he deserves credit for admitting that he erred—which was something, like actually getting an infrastructure deal, utterly beyond his predecessor.
The larger story, which often gets lost in the daily news cycle, is the enduring scale of Biden’s ambition. Simply put, he is trying to remake American domestic policy in a way rarely seen outside wartime. Looking at the scale of his proposals to tackle climate change, expand the social safety net, and check rising income inequality, the only comparable Democratic initiatives are the New Deal and the Great Society. Even those comparisons are a bit misleading: F.D.R. and Lyndon Johnson both enjoyed large majorities on Capitol Hill. Biden’s Democrats have a narrow, nine-vote majority in the House, while in the Senate he must rely on his Vice-President to break a tie. That’s if he can cajole the likes of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema into supporting him.
Pulling off this double-play is a mighty challenge, but Biden seems fully committed to doing so. That’s what he was trying to say last Thursday when he got himself in trouble. Assuming that the infrastructure package makes it to a vote, it will be the much smaller of the two spending bills that will dominate Capitol Hill over the next few months—and yet, by normal standards, it is far from small. According to a White House fact sheet, the two sides have agreed on $579 billion in new spending over five years. Add in extra spending already included in the existing congressional baseline, and the spending figure comes close to a trillion dollars over five years, and $1.2 trillion over eight years. Most of this money will be allocated to transportation projects, expanding broadband Internet access, and modernizing water systems. Brian Deese, Biden’s top economic adviser, says that there is enough money in the agreement to replace every lead water line and pipe in the country—which would have major public-health benefits, particularly in poor communities.
Admittedly, the financing of the package is murky. With Republicans refusing to accept higher taxes on corporations and the Biden Administration ruling out other taxes, it looks like deficit financing, expanded I.R.S. enforcement, repurposing of 2020 relief funds, and creative arithmetic will play the largest roles. The White House fact sheet on the agreement also mentions “public-private partnerships,” which is a fancy term for paying investors hefty fees to shell out for, and in some cases operate, public projects. Hopefully, Democrats in Congress will take a skeptical approach to this idea, which has proved costly and inflexible in other countries. Right now, though, both sides seem determined not to let the details of the financing scuttle the agreement.
The other spending bill, which Democratic committees on Capitol Hill are already hammering out, is very much a work in progress. We can be confident it will contain parts of Biden’s original infrastructure proposal—the American Jobs Plan—that aren’t included in the bipartisan agreement, such as green-energy initiatives. The bigger spending bill will also include elements of Biden’s American Families Plan, which calls for monthly child allowances, guaranteed paid leave, universal preschool for three- and four-year-olds, two years of free community college, and making an expansion of the earned-income tax credit for low-paid childless workers permanent. As yet, the over-all price tag for the big bill isn’t clear. Some idea of its scope is given by the fact that the Administration, in its recent budget proposal, called for $5 trillion in new spending over ten years.
Figures like these are hard to take in. Another way to gauge the scale of Biden’s ambition is to look at over-all spending as a share of G.D.P. Under the Biden budget, it would rise from its pre-pandemic average of roughly 21 per cent to an average of 24.5 per cent in the period from 2022 to 2031. In historical terms, a permanent spending jump of 3.5 per cent of G.D.P. is huge. But the Biden plan isn’t just about expanding the role of government to correct gaping market failures. In proposing to pay for this expansion by raising taxes on the ultra-rich and on corporations, it is also about rebalancing the economy to benefit the ordinary Americans who create the wealth and keep the country going.
The several-trillion-dollar question is how many of Biden’s proposals will make it into a final bill that Democrats can agree on. On Sunday, Manchin suggested that he would be willing to accept a reconciliation bill in the range of one-and-a-half trillion to two trillion dollars. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders, the chair of the Senate’s budget committee, is reportedly working on a six-trillion-dollar bill, which could include a big expansion of Medicare. Between two trillion dollars and six trillion dollars, there is a lot of room for disagreement. What prospect is there of Biden, together with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, successfully bridging the gap?
On Monday, I put that question to Jim Manley, a veteran Democratic strategist who, during a long career on Capitol Hill, worked for the Party lions Ted Kennedy and Harry Reid. Manley began by praising Biden for the scale of his ambition. “Frankly, after watching him as Vice-President and for many years in the Senate, I was a little skeptical about whether he would be able to step up to the moment,” Manley said. “He has proved me wrong. It is really impressive to see him swing for the fences.” Manley also said that he had modified his skepticism about the prospects of passing two different spending bills, one on a bipartisan basis and the other through reconciliation. “The President is not going to get everything he wants: a lot of stuff is going to get dumped overboard to satisfy Manchin,” Manley said. “But he now has a good chance of pulling this off.”
Of course, a lot of Democrats—including many of Biden’s own advisers—won’t consider it much of a victory if the final reconciliation bill omits groundbreaking reforms such as guaranteeing day care, setting up a national network of charging stations for electronic vehicles, and expanding child tax credits into a system of monthly cash allowances that could halve child deep-poverty. It is proposals like these that justify Biden’s claim to history, and explain why, so far, many progressive Democrats have been reluctant to break with him.
The upcoming internal negotiations will involve going through the White House agenda, item by item, and trying to craft a reconciliation bill that Manchin, Sinema, Sanders, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are all willing to vote for. “It is going to come down to the sweet art of persuasion,” Manley noted. Maintaining unity within the current Democratic Party was never going to be easy. During the 2020 campaign, and during his first five months in office, Biden demonstrated an uncanny ability to do just that. He has surprised people before. Can he do it again?
