The White House is scaling back expectations of a huge infrastructure bill to energize the coronavirus-crippled economy as focus returns to delivering money to struggling businesses and workers amid record unemployment increases.
Last week, President Trump announced his hopes for a $2 trillion plan to rebuild roads, bridges, and other crumbling structures as a way of putting America back to work.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi welcomed the president’s return to one of his early interests and said she wanted to see an infrastructure bill after the chamber’s return on April 20.
Less than a week later, everything has changed.
“Infrastructure is like Bigfoot,” said a senior Hill Republican. “Every once in a while, someone claims to have seen it and kicks up a frenzy.
“But it never existed to begin with.”
This time around, it was floated as the fourth phase of a coronavirus package that has already addressed making treatment affordable or free, mandated paid leave, and delivered a $2 trillion stimulus bill.
Last Tuesday, Trump set out his thinking in a tweet: “With interest rates for the United States being at zero, this is the time to do our decades long awaited infrastructure bill. It should be very big & bold, Two Trillion Dollars.”
By the end of the week, he was talking about fixing “roads, highways, tunnels, airports.”
“And the beauty is because of the fact that we are so strong as a country, we’re borrowing at zero,” he said during a regular White House coronavirus briefing. “We never had a chance to borrow at zero. Even in this country, we’d never had a chance to borrow at zero.”
“We’re going borrow — this is a great time,” he said.
[Read more: A coronavirus stimulus could finally bring ‘Infrastructure Week’ to a close]
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said he was talking to Republicans and Democrats about making it happen.
“We’ll continue to have those conversations. So, we expect there will be more bills,” he told CNBC. “And we think it is a great time now to invest in infrastructure.”
However, it set up a possible clash with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and conservatives who have long questioned Trump’s costly election infrastructure promises.
And on Friday, worse-than-expected employment numbers, with 6.6 million initial unemployment claims, saw Pelosi move her infrastructure plans on to the back burner in favor of more direct economic help for the worst affected.
This week, White House officials say the focus is on ensuring that the current phase three is the priority, and they want to make sure that its payroll protection provisions are working properly in getting cash to those that need it.
The president’s chief economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, told reporters at the White House on Monday that the administration was ready to ask for more money if it were needed to get checks into workers’ hands. But that was a “big if.”
“Let’s see what happens,” he said. “Our job is to execute what we’ve got.”
The result, said an official familiar with the strategy, was that infrastructure remained a phase four objective, but without a specific timeline for action.
“We’re back to where we were at the start of last week,” he said.
The result is a certain sense of deja vu for administration officials for whom any mention of infrastructure can cause palpitations. For two years, they worked on plans for “infrastructure week” only to have it repeatedly overtaken by events.
“We’d have it ready to go, and then it would get blown out of the water by a 7 a.m. tweet on Iran,” said a former senior administration official.
