White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Wednesday the administration has no plans to launch another push for infrastructure spending legislation this year.
“We’re going to continue looking at ways to improve that nation’s infrastructure, but in terms of a specific piece of legislation, I’m not aware that that will happen by the end of the year,” Sanders said at the daily White House press briefing.
There have been at least three serious attempts by the administration to spur congressional action on an infrastructure bill, seeing the package as an opportunity for bipartisanship.
The first push, dubbed “infrastructure week,” came in June 2017, spawning a running joke about short-lived attention given to the issue.
The June 2017 effort featured a series of promotional events where President Trump focused on infrastructure. Without a specific legislative proposal, the push fizzled.
The second so-called infrastructure week — featuring a presidential speech — coincided with August clashes between white supremacists and counter-protesters in Charlottesville, Va., and was overshadowed by Trump claiming “very fine people” were on both sides. The event ended in vehicular homicide by an accused neo-Nazi.
The third push happened in February, when the White House released its vision for an infrastructure package that had a $200 billion federal investment matched by $1.3 trillion in state and private funds. Many Democrats said the plan offered too little, and it went nowhere.
Sanders, addressing a reporter’s question about a large spending bill, said “I don’t know that there will be one by the end of this year. Certainly, as you mentioned, he has secured some funding for infrastructure projects. We also laid out priorities that we wanted to see in an infrastructure legislation package.”
