Biden Meets With U.S. Lawmakers On Infrastructure Push

President Joe Biden met on Thursday for more than an hour with a bipartisan group of lawmakers on the White House’s planned pursuit of a massive jump in spending on projects to restore crumbling U.S. infrastructure.

The big hurdle, as it has been for more than a decade, remains how to pay for trillions of dollars in new spending when neither Congress nor lawmakers have been willing to raise taxes or find new sources of revenue.

Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg met with House of Representatives members including Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Peter DeFazio, a Democrat, and congressman Sam Graves, the panel’s top Republican.

Biden said at the beginning of the meeting that he aimed for the United States to “once again lead the world across the board in infrastructure” and said doing so “makes us a hell of a lot more competitive around the world.” The White House has declined to say how much Biden will seek to spend on infrastructure or how he would pay for it.

DeFazio said after the meeting that Biden “wants to move as quickly as possible. He wants it to be very big and he feels that this is the key to the recovery package.”

Check out the full article from Reuters here.