Sen. Joni Ernst is pushing last-minute changes to President Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure package to increase transparency and ensure taxpayer dollars are not wasted.
Ms. Ernst, Iowa Republican, has offered a series of amendments to the infrastructure bill amid revelations that it is not fully paid for as the White House promised.
“The American people want new roads and bridges, not more bottomless boondoggles,” said Ms. Ernst. “Taxpayers are fed up with the federal government doling money out to rail and transit projects that go nowhere.”
To that end, Ms. Ernst is pushing an amendment to fully disclose the cost of the $1.2 trillion package to voters. She argues such transparency is needed because the 2,702-page bill was crafted behind closed doors for months and only made available to the public last week.
Despite the timing, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer is rushing to hold a final vote on the deal sometime this weekend. Most Republicans say they have not had enough time to review the bill, let alone endorse it.
“When you rush a 2,700 page bill through the Senate, things slip through the cracks,” said Sen. Marco Rubio, Florida Republican, who is opposing the legislation.
Since Republicans are unlikely to have the votes to kill the legislation, Ms. Ernst at least wants the public made aware of its true cost.
“I have an amendment that would expose the costs of projects … so taxpayers know how their money is being spent,” she said. “The only reason to oppose this amendment is if you have something to hide.”
Similarly, Ms. Ernst is pushing requirements that infrastructure funding does not go to public transit projects estimated to cost more than a billion dollars, or that are likely to lose money in the long run.
The amendment specifically targets rail projects in California, including a proposed subway line stretching from near House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s congressional district to Silicon Valley. That project is estimated to cost more than $1 billion per mile, significantly above initial estimates.
“The current infrastructure proposal could throw millions more at this project and others like it with no transparency or accountability for taxpayers, and that’s simply unacceptable,” said Ms. Ernst.
In a further effort to save taxpayer dollars, Ms. Ernst is proposing to repurpose money set aside for the public financing of elections. Ms. Ernst, in particular, wants to repurpose the $380 million appropriated for presidential election campaigns to fund infrastructure.
The move would help shore up the multitrillion-dollar package, which was found to be improperly funded earlier this week by the CBO. The nonpartisan agency estimates that more than half of the $550 billion the package proposes in new spending is unaccounted for.
The analysis shattered a major selling point that the infrastructure package’s authors had been making for weeks: mainly that it was fully funded without raising taxes.
“While we’ve heard for weeks that it would be paid for, it’s not,” said Sen. Bill Hagerty, Tennessee Republican. “It didn’t just come up short, it came up a quarter of a trillion dollars short.”
