As Obamacare repeal and tax reform stall on Capitol Hill, the White House has decided that maybe President Trump can launch a nationwide push to repair roads, bridges, ports and tracks this year after all.
“Infrastructure, the president has said all along, he believes it will be a bipartisan exercise, and it’s one that we will be looking to partner with them on,” Marc Short, the White House director of legislative affairs, told reporters on Monday evening.
Short said the White House did not yet know whether the infrastructure overhaul would take the form of a single bill or if it would be included in different pieces of legislation.
“We would hope that we would tackle it this calendar year,” he said of the timeline for an infrastructure package.
The White House had kicked off “Infrastructure Week” earlier Monday with a proposal to privatize the country’s air traffic control system, about which Democrats are not enthusiastic.
Infrastructure had emerged earlier this year as one of the few issues on which Republicans and Democrats could agree. If anything, the obstacle seemed to be fiscal conservatives objecting to the rumored price tag.
After Senate Democrats rolled out a $1 trillion package in January, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Trump “seems open to a bill that’s this large” and claimed he had already spoken with the president about the proposal.
Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., also backed the sweeping infrastructure plan, and he expressed optimism earlier this year that Republicans and Democrats could set aside their disagreements to strike a deal.
“I hope this is an area where all of us can get together because it is certainly something the American people want,” Sanders said.
Lawmakers from both parties agreed, just a few months ago, that an infrastructure plan could create jobs and stimulate the economy. But the issue was put on the back burner as congressional Republicans sought to address healthcare and tax reform. Now some GOP lawmakers are skeptical they can even get to those items this year.
When the White House revealed on Monday its ambitious proposal to shepherd an infrastructure package through Congress before the end of 2017, Democrats offered mixed messages as to whether they were still open to considering cooperation on such a massive and expensive policy.
“We will have to wait to see what the full details of the plan are before we judge it, but we Democrats welcome a discussion on infrastructure,” Schumer said on Monday.
The Trump administration’s decision to lead its infrastructure efforts with a proposal that Democrats have long opposed could spell trouble for the rest of its package.
“Unfortunately, based on recent reports, the entire focus of the president’s infrastructure ‘proposal’ this week is on privatization, which sounds like a nice word, but when you scratch beneath the surface, it means much less construction and far fewer jobs, particularly in rural areas,” Schumer said.
The New York Democrat also rejected the Trump administration’s approach to infrastructure funding, arguing on Monday that the president’s push for private investments would result in “Trump tolls” stretching “from one end of America to the other.”
Trump’s privatization push could conceivably increase Republican support for an infrastructure plan, however. Transporation Secretary Elaine Chao, a key figure in crafting the program, is married to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
Democrats and Republicans differ sharply on their views about how to pay for such a major undertaking. While Democrats would like the federal government to fund infrastructure projects directly, Republicans have called for federal tax credits, public-private partnerships and other funding mechanisms that would minimize the impact infrastructure investment would have on the deficit.
Another White House official said Monday that the administration still wants Democratic support on infrastructure.
“We hope that rebuilding our nation’s crumbling infrastructure … is an issue that we can all agree sorely needs to be addressed and that Democrats can see past their partisanship and work together with us on it,” the White House official told the Washington Examiner.
Liberal activists are already protesting.
“Instead of offering a solid plan that would create good jobs, directly invest in our nation’s decaying infrastructure, and target investment to the areas that need it the most, Trump’s infrastructure ‘plan’ focuses on putting public assets into private hands, creating yet another giveaway to wealthy corporations and millionaires at the expense of working families and communities,” said Vanita Gupta, the president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, the conservative senator who was Trump’s strongest opponent in the Republican presidential primaries, called for Democrats to work with Republicans on the air traffic control system.
“It’s my hope that we will see Republicans and Democrats coming together behind a pro-jobs initiative, and I commend the president for leading that,” Cruz said during an appearance on Fox Business.
While the White House is pushing Infrastructure Week, the administration is also struggling to keep headline-grabbing distractions from overshadowing its agenda.
Trump renewed his call for a travel ban to deter terrorism in a series of tweets on Monday morning, and former FBI Director James Comey’s testimony on Capitol Hill later this week will almost certainly tear the administration off message once again.
Asked on Monday evening about Trump’s travel ban tweets and whether such outbursts complicate the administration’s attempts to drive its agenda, Short replied: “I think the president often is very effective driving our message to Congress.”
Trump will continue his infrastructure push as he travels to Ohio on Wednesday to discuss moving freight through inland waterways. He will also participate in a listening session with governors and mayors in Washington on Thursday and speak at the Department of Transportation headquarters on Friday, where the president will unveil a plan to reform the infrastructure permitting process.
