Why Biden Is Right to Think Beyond the DOT in His Infrastructure Package
When opponents of Biden’s infrastructure plan argue that most of the package isn’t devoted to building “traditional” infrastructure like roads and bridges, they’re ignoring something absolutely critical: that America’s transportation landscape will never be truly safe or sustainable until we tackle our broken social safety nets and our broken street designs.
Top Republican lawmakers have decried the $1.9-trillion American Jobs Plan, which devotes nearly as much money to workforce development and care infrastructure programs (like expanding access to daycare, eldercare, and affordable housing) as it does to the steel-in-the-ground physical assets that make our society function.
Former Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought claimed on Fox News radio that “only about 5 to 7 percent of it is actual roads and bridges and ports and things that you and I would say is real infrastructure,” a quickly debunked stat which was nonetheless parroted by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. The Senate’s fourth-highest ranking member of the GOP, Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) later upped that number slightly, estimating that 30 percent of the money went to “real” infrastructure “if you stretch the definition of infrastructure some” to include water and broadband infrastructure, in addition to transportation facilities. The top Republican on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, Rep. Sam Graves (R-Mo.) even went so far as to say the President’s infrastructure package “needs to be a transportation bill,” further adding that “it needs to be about roads and bridges” rather than, presumably, transit infrastructure, pedestrian infrastructure, water infrastructure and cycling infrastructure.
Even as House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) seemed to agree that the transportation elements of the bill should be pried apart from the rest of the packages — if only for strategic reasons — progressive Democrats were quick to point out that the assets that keep our trains, wifi and water running absolutely do qualify as infrastructure. And so does housing and hospitals, not to mention the workforce that cares for children and seniors.
But if the American Jobs Plan passes, it will be the first major federal bill in recent memory that puts transportation, land use, and access to care infrastructure under the same umbrella where they belong.
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