A senior administration official said Wednesday that getting a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill through Congress this year will be a “stretch” for President Trump.
The official’s candid response to questions about the president’s infrastructure bill comes a day before Trump is scheduled to tout the plan during a visit to Richfield, Ohio.
“We see quite a bit of movement on Capitol Hill right now on certain parts of the president’s plan. Will we get the entire bill this year? That’s more of a stretch,” the official said during a call with reporters.
The administration viewed the omnibus spending bill that passed with bipartisan support last week as a step in the right direction for Trump’s $1.5 trillion infrastructure initiative, pointing specifically to an increase in funding for a discretionary grant program known as TIGER.
“The way that fits into [Trump’s] overall vision is that the TIGER program allows states and localities… to come to us with their priorities,” the official said.
Trump is expected to stress the importance of state and local infrastructure investments during remarks to members of the International Union of Operating Engineers on Thursday. The president campaigned on a massive infrastructure bill that could incentivize private spending during the 2016 election and first unveiled details of a plan earlier this year during his State of the Union address.
“The state of Ohio is already working to fulfill a key goal of the president’s infrastructure initiative and that is returning power back to state and local governments,” the administration official said ahead of Trump’s visit to the Buckeye State.
Trump reportedly threatened to veto last week’s spending package over its initial inclusion of money for the Gateway tunnel project in New York City, a program that was eventually struck from the omnibus but could still receive funding through other infrastructure provisions in the bill.
“The president’s position on Gateway has been relatively clear, which is that we don’t want to dingle out individual projects and have earmarks for those projects,” the administration official said Wednesday, adding that the White House wants “to be able to look across the country as a whole in terms of where is the most advantageous place for us to invest scarce federal dollars.”
