President Biden Signs The Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill Into Law
After months of intense debate, negotiation, voting and waiting, the 1.2 trillion-dollar infrastructure bill made it through Congress and arrived at the desk of President Biden. Now that bill is law, as the President signed it during an event on the White House lawn Monday afternoon.
If you are unaware as to what is in this infrastructure bill, here is a little breakdown:
- It involves $550 billion in new spending over the next 5 years
- $110 billion to help rebuild roads and bridges
- $73 billion to rebuild the power grid
- $65 billion to improve high-speed internet/broadband
- $66 billion for improvements to railroads and freight cars
- $55 billion to clean up the nation’s water pipes and remove lead pipes
- $39 billion to improve public transit
- $29 billion for improvements to airports
- $7.5 billion to build electric car charging stations
- Along with a lot more.
Spirits were high and speeches upbeat as President Biden prepared to put this long-awaited plan into motion. There were speeches from democratic senator Kyrsten Cinema, Republican Senator Rob Portman, House Speaker nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Vice President kamala Harris, President Biden and several business leaders from across the country. Their speeches congratulated both parties for getting the plan passed and in a bipartisan way.
There were many people in attendance for this event. Some of them included: governors, both Republican and Democratic lawmakers, Cabinet members and business leaders, amongst others.
Now that the bill is signed, we move into the implementation stage of the process. During his speech, President biden announced that he would be putting former New Orleans mayor, Mitch Landrieu, in charge of this implementation effort.
With the signing complete, President Biden, First Lady Jill Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and several Cabinet members are hitting the road to talk about how the infrastructure package will be able to help different communities all throughout the country. The first stop is happening today, as the President will be in New Hampshire at a broken bridge in need of repairs. He will then be in Detroit on Wednesday, visiting a General Motors facility responsible for assembling electric vehicles. There will be more stops after that as well.
Next up on the President’s agenda is getting the Build Back Better plan passed. At the moment it is stuck in the House, with debate over its contents continuing on into this week. As it stands, the bill would cost about $1.85 trillion. In her speech yesterday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that they are hoping to have the bill passed through the House by the end of this week.
