From WSJopinion: The infrastructure bill is filled with financial gimmicks, waste and expansions of Washington power, writes KimStrassel
It isn’t just the Biden administration that is keen to redefine the term “infrastructure.” A growing number of Republican senators are getting in on the act, and more fool the party.
A bipartisan group of 10 senators last weekend finally released the 2,702 pages of their infrastructure bill. Explaining that they’d worked “day and night” to finalize the legislation, they touted their work product as a “historic” investment in “hard infrastructure” that will “create good-paying jobs.” As well the GOP members of the group might. “Infrastructure” sounds a lot better than “spendathon,” “central planning,” “corporate bailouts,” “Solyndra” and “Green New Deal.
Polls show a majority of Americans support the idea of infrastructure spending, so the bill takes care to lead with items that most people associate with that term—highways, bridges, tunnels, ports, waterways. Yet according to a breakout from the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, those provisions account for about $127 billion, or a mere 23%, of the bill’s $548 billion in new spending.
The bill is better viewed as step one of President Biden’s Green New Deal, giving his appointees and federal bureaucrats tens of billions with which to remake the economy. The Energy Department gets more than $20 billion to reprise its failed role as a green-energy venture capitalist. The Federal Emergency Management Agency gets $3.5 billion to deal with flooding.
The bill similarly gives the feds unprecedented and centralized control over chunks of the economy. Washington will now dictate rules in areas that have traditionally been managed by local authorities even as it muscles in on private-sector enterprises like broadband. The bill turns Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg into an electric-vehicle czar, with authority to pinpoint new charging stations down to the mile marker.
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