Biden’s $579 Billion Plan Is a Tiny Step in the Right Direction

After four years of “infrastructure weeks” during the Trump administration that always came to naught, President Joe Biden and a bipartisan group of lawmakers have agreed on a $579 billion package of spending on roads, bridges, transit, clean power, and other infrastructure. It might still come to naught, but it’s at least further along than anything of its ilk since the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

The plan is to spend the $579 billion over five years, which amounts to about 0.4% of what the Congressional Budget Office expects gross domestic product to be over that period. Current federal, state, and local government infrastructure spending is, depending on the measure used (there are many!), somewhere on either side of 2% of GDP, so this would be a significant if not exactly historic increase.