More than 60,000 projects are slated to receive funding from 2021’s bipartisan infrastructure bill, with every state budget in the country counting on a piece of the $1.2 trillion law.
Republicans are now plotting how to use their new Washington trifecta to cut spending and implement the rest of the Trump agenda — using the reconciliation process and the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency to help identify targets — but it’s very likely infrastructure projects won’t be on anyone’s list of things to cut.
“I wouldn’t be looking to find a lot of savings there, except by reducing regulations to reduce the cost of some of those things,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer, who was one of 19 Republicans to support the infrastructure bill.
Experts agree that the funding is fairly tied up in projects now and has support in even the reddest districts it benefits. Texas, for example, had over $7 billion in funding for projects awarded as a result of the law, according to data from energy research firm Atlas Public Policy.
Nick Nigro, Atlas’ founder, told NOTUS that these projects seem popular enough to stay, especially now that more of them are visibly coming online.
“There’s clearly momentum in the program now, and I only expect that momentum can continue into 2025 as states become more familiar with this,” he said.
While the bill passed the Senate with broad bipartisan support, only two Republican members of the House voted for it. Most congressional Republicans — even if their district or state benefits from the law’s spending — oppose the law’s provisions that boost clean energy projects.
“It should be clawed back, because 85% of it did not deal with what people would consider traditional transportation issues,” Rep. Tim Burchett said. “People just vote for those things, because they get their little spot taken care of where they grease their lobbyists, or their family member works in that industry or whatever, and that’s just wrong.”
Burchett said he doubted most of his colleagues shared his view on the law or his desire to roll most of it back.
“They’re not willing to go through on a lot of that because they got their little projects in their districts, and they gotta take care of it,” Burchett said.
Cramer drew a distinction between traditional transportation funding in the law and the clean energy provisions, which Cramer called “a total waste of money.”
“The faster we get rid of a lot of those mandates to save that money, the better,” he said.
“Physical infrastructure — that’s legitimate federal infrastructure, like roads, bridges, highways, the ports and waterways that move commerce — is pretty high priority” to keep, Cramer said.
Rep. Derrick Van Orden echoed strong opposition to the climate provisions and added that any pandemic relief in the law should also be chopped. (The law provides for the tourism industry and household broadband support based on the COVID-19 pandemic.)
“We should probably stop spending hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars on something that doesn’t exist,” he said of COVID-19 spending.
The Biden administration has granted $568 billion so far, and the awards usually promise that the federal government will pay for a certain percentage of a project while the state provides the rest. That means it’s highly unlikely any of that money could be clawed back, even if Congress wanted to do so.
“I think there’s going to be a robust constituency to preserve those investments,” Democratic Rep. Sean Casten said. “I mean, there’s a battery manufacturing plant in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s district. She may be stupid, she may deny the laws of physics. She also has constituents who would like to keep those jobs.” Greene’s state of Georgia received $2 billion in funding awards. (Greene’s deputy chief of staff, Nick Dyer, responded that he “had to Google to find out who he was, but Sean Casten seems to be an asshole.” Dyer then went on to attack Casten for supporting transgender people and called them “mentally ill.”)
Donald Trump pledged in September to pull back any unspent funds in the Inflation Reduction Act — the climate law that passed subsequently to the infrastructure bill and some House Republicans think he should do the same with the infrastructure spending.
Rep. Mike Collins said he wanted to see Congress repeal “anything that hadn’t been spent, especially on bike paths and all that green junk.”
Even if Congress left the law untouched, Trump will have a huge say in how the leftover funds are spent. In addition to the unawarded $294 billion, Trump’s administration and agencies will be able to decide who gets a piece of the $87 billion in “competitive grantmaking,” per the Brookings Institution.
But for now, cutting back on that money doesn’t seem to be a priority in the near-term budget reconciliation process, which Senate Republicans said will focus heavily on immigration and tax cuts.
“I don’t know what all we gonna put in there,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville said of the reconciliation package. “The one thing that we’ve talked about is what the American people want done. They want the border done, and they want the tax reform put back in place, and hopefully we make it permanent.”
Several lawmakers floated leaving the discussion of possible savings over to Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who are set to co-lead the new Department of Government Efficiency.
“We’re gonna leave that up to the DOGE guys,” Tuberville told NOTUS.
“I think actually, with Elon and Vivek, DOGE, that there’s a lot of areas that we can find where there’d be savings simply by changing some of the policies that are working against the very investments that we’re making,” Cramer said.
—
Helen Huiskes and Mark Alfred are NOTUS reporters and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows.