Democrats have touted the infrastructure bill Congress passed in 2021 as a signature accomplishment of the Biden-Harris administration, but some of its ambitious projects have fallen far short of expectations nearly three years after President Joe Biden signed it into law.
A massive program to expand rural broadband access has failed so far to connect any homes to the internet. A push to electrify school bus fleets has proved costly and inefficient. And a multibillion-dollar effort to build thousands of electric vehicle charging stations across the country has so far yielded just a handful of stations.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act contained $1.2 trillion in spending on what the White House called “a once-in-a-generation investment in our nation’s infrastructure and competitiveness.”
But critics say the progressive goals of the Biden-Harris administration held back the law from delivering sweeping updates to the nation’s infrastructure.
“I was very skeptical that it would actually deliver those kinds of results,” David Ditch, senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, told the Washington Examiner. “It has dramatically underperformed even my low expectations, and there’s a lot of reasons for that.”
“No. 1 is the Biden administration has been absolutely determined to apply as many different left-wing mandates as it can cram in,” Ditch added.
From “environmental justice” considerations to equity requirements for contractors, many programs created by the infrastructure bill came with progressive stipulations for how they should be implemented. The result has been slow progress on spending enormous sums of money, with little to show for some efforts after nearly three years.
“The evidence of these programs being a complete failure is that none of the recipients, grantees, have featured in a [Kamala] Harris commercial or onstage,” Daniel Turner, executive director at Power the Future, told the Washington Examiner. “If you received a benefit from the infrastructure bill or the Inflation Reduction Act, you would be front and center saying, ‘Thank you, madame vice president, for this program.’”
Instead, the infrastructure bill has made few appearances in Harris’s campaign rhetoric as she seeks to distance herself from Biden.
Read more at Washingtonexaminer.com
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