It’s become a running joke in Washington: It’s always “Infrastructure Week” as a deal on rebuilding U.S. infrastructure still appears just out of reach, overshadowed by intense partisan politics.
The coronavirus pandemic, though, could change all that. As President Trump and top lawmakers look for low-hanging fruit they can pick to boost an economy reeling from the outbreak, they’re settling on a common theme: a massive infrastructure package.
“With interest rates for the United States being at ZERO, this is the time to do our decades long-awaited Infrastructure Bill,” Trump tweeted March 31. “It should be VERY BIG & BOLD, Two Trillion Dollars, and be focused solely on jobs and rebuilding the once great infrastructure of our Country! Phase 4.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, too, is pushing hard on infrastructure, outlining priorities that include rebuilding roads and bridges, strengthening water infrastructure, building out broadband, and modernizing the electricity grid. Many of those goals could garner bipartisan support in theory.
On April 1, Pelosi and other top House Democrats unveiled an updated version of their legislative framework from January, adding a $10 billion funding boost for community health centers onto the already $760 billion price tag over five years.
Democrats will also roll out detailed plans to boost education and housing, which Pelosi told reporters would put their overall framework “in the ballpark” of the $2 trillion Trump is seeking.
And at least some Senate Republicans already see infrastructure as the critical piece of any economic recovery.
“Roads, bridges, tunnels — that has to be part of that. Funding goes right to the states, which allows them to put their plans in action,” said Sen. John Barrasso. The Wyoming Republican sits in GOP leadership, chairs the Senate Environment Committee, and introduced his bipartisan highway bill last summer with his Democratic counterpart, Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware.
That bill, which reauthorizes surface transportation spending at $287 billion over five years, has already cleared his committee. Barrasso said he’s also looking at ways to boost water infrastructure further.
Infrastructure “does seem to be a really important way to get resources immediately to the states and people working right away,” Barrasso told the Washington Examiner in an interview.
Advocates in the labor and environmental community, too, are clamoring for more infrastructure investment — and quickly.
“Honestly, we would have liked to see more of that in this legislation because even the most shovel-ready projects take time to plan and engineer,” said Jason Walsh, executive director of the BlueGreen Alliance, which brings together major labor unions and environmental groups. But he added he understood “the need to triage” to deal with the pandemic.
Nonetheless, even as the moment seems ripe for a deal, it’s far from cemented.
Republican leadership in both chambers is trying to pump the brakes on a phase four coronavirus package, cautioning that it’s not yet clear whether another bill is necessary and that lawmakers should wait to see how the $2 trillion phase three legislation is implemented.
Political disputes over how to pay for an infrastructure package have consistently held up an agreement. However, Trump has suggested he’d prefer that the U.S. borrow the money since interest rates are near zero.
GOP lawmakers are also very wary that Pelosi wants to use a new round of coronavirus relief talks to push through priorities Democrats weren’t able to get in the phase three legislation.
Pelosi has already signaled as much. In addition to infrastructure, she said she’ll push for some other priorities, including more funding to state and local governments, money for Washington and the U.S. Postal Service, extended paid family leave, and infectious disease protections for healthcare workers.
“I’m not going to allow this to be an opportunity for the Democrats to achieve unrelated policy items that they would not otherwise be able to pass,” McConnell said March 31 on the Hugh Hewitt Show.
McConnell and other Republicans accused Pelosi of flying back to Washington at the last minute and demanding the inclusion of several policy measures, including emissions limits for airlines and extensions of wind and solar tax credits.
The latter didn’t even make it into House Democrats’ phase three counterproposal. But even the prospect enraged Republicans, who said Pelosi was trying to jam the liberal “Green New Deal” into the pandemic relief bill. GOP lawmakers are already bracing for round two.
“This isn’t a time to attempt to reshape America through the eyes of one political party,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, said in an April 1 statement addressing Pelosi’s plans for phase four.
The ordeal also left a bitter taste in Trump’s mouth.
“That doesn’t mean we’re going to do the ‘Green New Deal’ because I won’t do it. I won’t approve it,” Trump said of his infrastructure push, during a March 31 briefing. “We’re not going to do the ‘Green New Deal’ and, you know, spend 40% of the money on things that people just have fun with.”
Even so, House Democrats say they want to see an infrastructure package that not only puts people back to work but also looks toward what they see as the next major U.S. crisis: climate change.
“I believe climate change, even in times of coronavirus, is an existential threat,” said congressman Peter DeFazio, an Oregon Democrat who chairs the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. DeFazio has led work on the House Democrats’ infrastructure framework.
“If we’ve got to rebuild our infrastructure, let’s rebuild it in a way” that is resilient to extreme weather, uses less carbon-intensive resources, and moves away from fossil fuel dependence, he told reporters April 1.
House Democrats’ infrastructure framework, for example, would scale up investments in electric vehicle charging infrastructure and zero-emissions buses, incentivize sustainable jet fuel development and use, and expand renewable energy infrastructure in low-income communities.
Emphasizing such a climate focus, though, could sour Republicans to efforts by the clean energy sector to push for tax credit tweaks to help them deal with virus-related project delays.
The wind and solar industries are stepping up calls for a “direct pay” option for their federal incentives, as well as extensions to the deadlines by which projects must break ground to qualify for credits. The energy storage industry has also requested that Congress approve an investment tax credit for standalone storage, an independent concept that already has bipartisan support.
But if those asks are caught up in a broader partisan climate fight, they could be set aside.
The clean energy sector has been quick to quantify the potential economic harms and job losses that extended project delays and uncertainty over tax credits could create. Those harms aren’t limited to Democratic states or districts, they say.
Tom Kiernan, the head of the American Wind Energy Association, said he’s focused on wind industry workers and the rural communities that often benefit from land-lease or tax payments from wind projects. And he stressed that deadline extensions and a “direct pay” option are to make sure U.S. industry gets the full benefit of the existing policy.
“What we’re looking for is some confidence that these policies that Congress has enacted in the past are available going forward as presumed when these projects were designed and the initial planning was going on,” Kiernan said in a recent interview.
More broadly, climate advocates, even right-leaning ones, see an opportunity to tie climate and clean energy to infrastructure in a bipartisan way.
Several have pointed to the Senate’s bipartisan energy bill, which they say could offer a foundation for agreement on emissions-cutting measures, mainly since it includes technology demonstration programs that could create jobs. That bill failed two procedural votes in early March, just before Congress began working on coronavirus relief in earnest, after it got caught up in a partisan fight over a tangential amendment.
“I’d like to see Republicans candidly support the energy package in a bill and other provisions” for clean energy tax credits, said Heather Reams, the executive director of Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, a conservative clean energy and climate group. Those policies “are commonsense, good for the economy, good for the American people, good for the environment, and good for energy independence.”
Reams also said she hopes the bipartisan agreement on the phase three coronavirus bill is a signal to Democrats that everyone can benefit if they seek common ground with Republicans.
Others would like to see lawmakers in both parties think more creatively as they consider an economic stimulus. One such space could be to boost incentives for U.S. clean energy manufacturing dramatically.
“There’s an opportunity to reindustrialize the U.S. clean energy manufacturing space, not just deploy Chinese-made solar panels,” said Paul Bledsoe, a strategic adviser for the Progressive Policy Institute. He said he thinks such a push could gain bipartisan support since lawmakers in both parties recognize how much China dominates the clean energy supplier markets.
“I think we didn’t pay enough attention to the manufacturing piece of clean technology in 2009,” added Bledsoe, who served as a climate adviser in the Clinton White House. The 2009 American Recovery Act, signed by former President Barack Obama, appropriated around $90 billion for clean energy investments and focused on scaling up technologies like solar power.
Supporting clean energy manufacturing, too, is critical to set up U.S. companies for the future and to ensure that emerging low-carbon technologies such as carbon capture and storage are deployed at scale in this country as opposed to concentrated abroad, BlueGreen Alliance’s Walsh said.
Conservatives, meanwhile, are hoping lawmakers’ creative thinking could extend to regulatory reform, which they see as a critical complement to any infrastructure investments.
Barrasso said there’s already some of that in his highway bill. “It cuts a lot of red tape so projects can get started and be done better and smarter and cheaper,” he told the Washington Examiner.
Democrats, though, are likely to balk at many efforts for regulatory reform, especially of environmental laws, out of fear that Republicans would attempt to weaken pollution protections or requirements that companies review the environmental effects of their projects.
Conservatives say, though, that cutting red tape would benefit all types of infrastructure and energy projects, including in the clean energy sector.
“The current political climate presents an opportunity to reduce regulatory impediments to clean energy infrastructure that stimulate investment and enhance our fiscal outlook, such as overhauling environmental permitting, streamlining power plant interconnection and reforming transmission system planning, utilization, and siting practices,” said Devin Hartman, director of energy and environmental policy at the R Street Institute, a free-market think tank, in a statement to the Washington Examiner.
But Hartman cautioned lawmakers against pumping money into “politically popular projects,” saying they should instead opt for targeted, temporary relief.
“The COVID response is a multimonth issue, whereas addressing climate change requires improving our institutions and policies to enhance private-sector investment over decades,” he said.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article quoted Jason Walsh saying “advanced nuclear” as part of low-carbon technologies but he was only referring to carbon capture so the phrase was removed.
