Republicans say the nearly $500 billion infrastructure package House Democrats unveiled Wednesday focuses too heavily on climate change mandates and liberal wish list items to be a starting point for negotiations.
“House Democrats love affair with red tape and the Green New Deal is getting in the way of getting America back to work,” Sen. John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican who chairs the Senate Environment Committee, told the Washington Examiner in a statement.
Barrasso has led the development of the Senate’s infrastructure legislation, which he co-sponsored with his Democratic counterpart on the environment committee, Delaware’s Tom Carper. Their surface transportation bill, along with two bipartisan water infrastructure bills, cleared the Senate environment committee unanimously.
Top Republicans on the House Transportation Committee, too, criticized the bill, issuing a statement they weren’t consulted at all on the infrastructure package.
“Numerous new green mandates and extreme progressive goals are woven throughout the fabric of the new and existing core programs,” said GOP Reps. Sam Graves of Missouri, Rodney Davis of Illinois, and Rick Crawford of Arkansas.
House Democrats’ legislation would invest $494 billion in highways, bridges, and other surface transportation over five years — nearly twice as much as the Senate’s $287 billion package. The House bill includes massive increases in investment in electric vehicle charging infrastructure and zero-emissions buses.
“We’re still running our economy on an inefficient, 1950s-era system that costs Americans increasingly more time and money while making the transportation sector the nation’s biggest source of carbon pollution,” said House Transportation Committee Chairman Peter DeFazio, an Oregon Democrat who is leading efforts on the bill, in a statement.
Federal funding for highways and transit expires in September, and members of both parties and President Trump have suggested infrastructure could be an opportunity to boost the U.S. economy as it recovers from the coronavirus pandemic. Nonetheless, the criticism of the House bill from Republicans in both chambers suggests tough negotiations ahead.
The House Democrats’ bill provides $319 billion for highways; $105 billion for public transit, including zero-emissions buses; $60 billion for railways; and $10 billion for vehicle safety, according to a summary from the committee.
The bill authorizes a number of climate-related grants to make infrastructure more resilient to the effects of global warming and to prioritize projects that slash greenhouse gas emissions. It would also require the Transportation Department to establish carbon emissions performance targets and would measure state-level transportation emissions.
The legislation is modeled in part on a $760 billion infrastructure framework House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other top Democrats released earlier this year.
In early April, Pelosi suggested infrastructure could be a key piece of coronavirus recovery legislation. Yet lawmakers shifted focus to emergency response efforts, including funding to small businesses, front-line workers, and states and cities.
Even so, the opportunity for an infrastructure package has loomed in the background. Trump, too, has supported an infrastructure bill as part of coronavirus recovery efforts, calling in March for a $2 trillion bill.
Republican lawmakers, however, say House Democrats’ bill lacks flexibility for states and prioritizes funding for urban areas over rural communities.
Barrasso also slammed the bill for increasing funding for public transit too much “at a time when fewer Americans will use these systems because of COVID.”
“Infrastructure legislation is critical to our economic recovery, and it must help the entire country, not just select urban centers,” said Barrasso, who is holding a hearing Thursday in the Senate environment committee on the topic. “The only way for that to happen is bipartisanship.”
