The chairman of a key Senate committee intends to advance a bipartisan surface transportation bill this spring, even as negotiations around the Biden administration’s infrastructure proposal heat up.
It’s a signal that some Democratic lawmakers want to attempt to craft infrastructure legislation that their Republican colleagues will support rather than rush to jam a sprawling package through along partisan lines.
BIDEN INFRASTRUCTURE PLAN INCLUDES MASSIVE SPENDING AND REGULATIONS TO CURB CLIMATE CHANGE
President Joe Biden introduced a more than $2 trillion infrastructure plan last week that includes significant funding to curb climate change and boost clean energy that many Republicans have called too expansive.
Sen. Tom Carper, a Delaware Democrat who leads the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, told the Washington Examiner in an interview that he is aiming to report major surface transportation reauthorization legislation out of his committee before the end of May.
The legislation will build off a similar bill that the committee approved unanimously in 2019 but which was never taken up on the floor. “There’s no top-line figure at this stage, but I hope it will be at least $300 billion,” Carper told the Washington Examiner of this year’s bill in a follow-up statement after the interview. The 2019 bill would have authorized $287 billion over five years.
Carper said that the prior bill, which he crafted jointly with then-Chairman John Barrasso of Wyoming, was the first surface transportation bill to have a dedicated climate section. The bill offered funding to increase the resilience of roads and bridges to climate change effects, support the build-out of electric vehicle charging and hydrogen refueling stations, and incentivize states to reduce their transportation emissions.
Carper said the legislation he plans to advance this Congress will build off of that bill, including stronger climate provisions, but he intends for the bill to be bipartisan.
“We like to work together. We like to work across the aisle, and we believe that bipartisan solutions can be lasting solutions,” Carper said of his GOP counterpart Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia.
The committee is already exploring how to pay for its transportation bill, too, which Carper called the hardest piece of negotiations.
Next week, Carper said he will hold a hearing focused on a vehicle miles traveled tax, which would impose a fee based on the miles driven by passenger cars as an alternative to the gasoline tax. The hearing will explore pilot programs where vehicle miles traveled fees have been imposed, he said.
Overall, Carper’s immediate focus is the surface transportation legislation. It’s not clear how his efforts will line up with the Biden administration’s plans, which right now are a broad proposed framework lacking specific legislative language.
However, Carper said he expects his committee, along with the Banking, Finance, and Commerce committees, to collaborate and help “write significant parts of the ‘Build Back Better’ proposal from this administration.”
Carper generally praised the Biden administration’s proposal, saying it addresses a critical intersection of creating jobs and curbing climate change, something the senator said he has long focused on.
“For me, that’s the holy grail, and there’s a fair amount in this proposal that actually gets us to that nexus of better outcomes for our planet, for our people, and for job creation,” he said.
Biden’s plans propose $571 billion for transportation infrastructure, according to a spreadsheet a Transportation Department official shared with officials on the Hill.
A bulk of that sum, $322 billion, would go to fixing roads and bridges, repairing transit and rail, improving airports, and cleaning ports and waterways, the document notes. Biden’s plan would also spend $160 billion on electric vehicles in order to build out Biden’s promised 500,000 public charging stations, offer people rebates to buy electric cars, and electrify buses and transit.
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Carper, who said he has long had a “love affair” with the auto industry, also sees a need to invest heavily in electric vehicle infrastructure. He touted bipartisan legislation he introduced in March that would expand and extend tax credits for clean vehicle infrastructure such as electric vehicle chargers and hydrogen refueling stations.
“It’s not just up to the federal government to deploy those, as the president said, 500,000 charging stations across America. This is a shared responsibility,” Carper said, noting state and local governments, gas station owners, and utilities must all be involved, too.
