Editorial: The infrastructure deal: Probably necessary, but not nearly sufficient

After weeks of negotiations, Republicans and Democrats in the Senate finally found a way to agree on a $579-billion increase in badly needed infrastructure spending: Stick almost exclusively to traditional road, bridge and rail projects, and find a bogus way to pay for them. By the White House’s estimate, the deal would provide about two-thirds of the roughly $900 billion Biden requested for such things as highways, mass transit and Amtrak, along with an assortment of infrastructure investments not usually funded by the federal government, such as broadband networks, new water pipes for schools and electric vehicle charging stations. Nor is there anything in the plan for housing, schools or child care centers; where Biden’s plan looked holistically at the investments that could promote economic growth, the bipartisan negotiators’ proposal focuses too narrowly on the sort of things lawmakers are accustomed to thinking about as infrastructure. In addition to such smoke-and-mirrors techniques as extending mandatory spending cuts and cracking down on tax cheats, the negotiators propose to reclaim unspent COVID-19 relief dollars from 2020 — spending that wasn’t paid for in the first place. Democrats intend to put many of the items dropped from the president’s initial proposal, along with elements of Biden’s $1.8-trillion American Families Plan, into a budget reconciliation bill that cannot be filibustered, and so needs no Republican support.