White House: Confident Biden’s $1 tr bill will pass

Washington: The $1 trillion infrastructure bill that  President Joe Biden signs  into law represents a historic achievement at a time  of deeply fractured politics.  But the compromises needed  to bridge the political divide  suggest that the spending  might not be as transformative as Biden has promised  for the U.S. economy.

Faced with flagging support as the U.S. continues to  slog through a pandemic and  rising inflation, the president  has treated infrastructure  as proof that  government  can function  again. Ahead  of Monday’s  signing ceremony, he instructed his  Cabinet on  Friday to rigorously police  the coming investments in  roads, bridges, water systems, broadband, ports, electric vehicles  and the power grid to ensure  they pay off.

Biden held off on signing  the hard-fought infrastructure deal after it passed on  Nov. 5 until legislators would  be back from a congressional recess and could join in  a splashy bipartisan event.  The gathering Monday on  the White House lawn will include governors and mayors  of both parties and labor and  business leaders. On Sunday  night before the signing, the  White House announced  Mitch Landrieu, the former  New Orleans mayor, would  coordinate the implementation of the infrastructure  spending.

In order to achieve a bipartisan deal, the president had  to cut back his initial ambition to spend $2.3 trillion on  infrastructure by more than  half. The bill that becomes  law on Monday in reality includes about $550 billion in  new spending over 10 years,  since some of the expenditures in the package were  already planned. Yet the administration still views the  bill as a national project  with a broad  range of investments and  the potential  ways to improve people’s  l ive s w i t h  clean drinking water and  high-speed internet.

Historians,  economists  and engineers  interviewed by The Associated Press welcomed Biden’s  efforts. But they stressed that  $1 trillion was not nearly  enough to overcome the government’s failure for decades  to maintain and upgrade the  country’s infrastructure. The  politics essentially forced a  trade-off in terms of potential impact not just on the climate but on the ability to outpace the rest of the world this  century and remain the dominant economic power. House  progressives had threatened  to hold up the infrastructure  bill without a firm commitment of immediate action  on the broader package.