Democrats tried to pass a big climate bill the last time they controlled the White House and Congress. It failed in a Senate with a bigger Democratic majority than the one they currently have.

More than 10 years after that bill — commonly known by the names of its co-authors (then-Rep. Henry Waxman and then-Rep. and now Sen. Ed Markey) — died without getting a vote in the US Senate, the United States is seeing more severe impacts of climate change. In recent days, an intense “heat dome” has scorched the West, one of many heat waves scientists say climate change is making worse. A group of Democratic senators fears that the coming months may present their last, best hope to actually do something about it.

“The time to do something was 20 years ago,” Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) told me recently. “The second-best time to do something is now.”

Democrats are now pinning their climate hopes on President Joe Biden’s initial $2 trillion American Jobs Plan, which has major investments in clean energy, electric vehicles, and climate resilience. But much like 2010, nothing is certain. As the White House negotiates with a bipartisan group of senators on a slimmed-down infrastructure bill, progressive senators are worried that climate provisions of the bill will be minimized or stripped out. They’re sounding the alarm about the nation’s future if Congress — yet again — fails to pass major climate legislation.

“I’m terrified of what happens if we don’t act,” Sen. Ben Ray Lujan (D-NM) said. Heinrich, his Senate colleague in New Mexico, added, “My state is burning up.”

Biden administration officials insist they can still hit ambitious new greenhouse gas emission reductions even if Congress doesn’t pass serious investments in clean energy and electric vehicles. But some close to the White House are doubtful a clean energy revolution can happen without action from Congress.

John Podesta, President Barack Obama’s former climate adviser, told me that even though Biden’s executive branch can push regulations and green-light clean energy projects on its own, a lot depends on how much Congress invests in clean energy before the 2022 midterms — when Republicans will have a chance to take back the House and Senate.

Biden “needs the investments, and a lot rides on, does he get the things he’s proposed in the American Jobs Plan?” Podesta said. “You can get some things going, but boy, I think they’re pretty dependent on some of the things [Congress] puts forth.”

And progressives are also worried what not delivering on a bold climate and infrastructure package could mean for the 2022 midterms, which largely hinge on turning out a fired-up Democratic base. More liberal lawmakers are coalescing around a new slogan: “No climate, no deal.”

“We’re not going to be able to get votes for a bill that does not seriously address the climate crisis,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said.

The tepid economic recovery under Obama pushed Democrats to go big on recent stimulus. Many also learned a darker lesson about opportunities to pass climate legislation: The stakes of inaction are incredibly high.

Why the 2009 climate bill failed

Fresh off resounding victories in the White House and Congress in the 2008 election, Democrats had an ambitious list of policy proposals. Combatting climate change was a big priority, but it fell behind passing economic stimulus, expanding health care, and a financial reform bill after the recent economic crash.

For about a six-month window from summer 2009 to January 2010, Democrats had the 60 votes needed for a filibuster-proof majority. But that changed when Republican Scott Brown won the special Senate election in Massachusetts to fill the seat of the late Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy.

“We thought we had more time with that supermajority than we ended up having,” Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), a member of Senate Democratic leadership, told me in an interview last summer. “Sen. Byrd died and Sen. Kennedy died, and we only had a matter of months and got the [Affordable Care Act] done, an economic stimulus package, and Dodd-Frank done.”

Work on the Waxman-Markey climate bill began in the US House, where it would continue for months of drafting and committee input. The officially titled “American Clean Energy and Security Act” was introduced in May 2009, weighing in at 1,400 pages.

Democrats’ plan would have capped the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions at a lower level, giving fossil fuel companies the ability to buy emissions offsets to hit their targets, or pay up if they went over. They settled on the cap-and-trade model in part because it was something that past Republican presidents had embraced. President George H.W. Bush proposed a cap-and-trade system as part of the 1990 Clean Air Act to help reduce sulfur emissions — and many Republican senators voted for it.

Indeed, the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill was controversial among climate activists and experts who thought it was too friendly to big business and called for a carbon tax instead. The bill also contained funding for many of the things Biden is trying to do today, including incentives to support more electric vehicles and clean energy.

The bill squeaked through the House on a vote of 219-212 in June 2009, after months of work and whipping votes by Pelosi’s team. It never even made it to the floor of the Senate, because then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had lost his supermajority with the Massachusetts election, and Democrats were suddenly staring down a set of tough midterms in the House and Senate.

“The votes weren’t there,” said Jim Manley, a former spokesperson for Reid. “I found that some of the worst vote counters around were in the environmental community at this time. I don’t blame them for trying.” Democrats’ big climate bill died in the Senate in 2010.

That history is a warning for Democrats today, who have no margin for error in their current 50-50 Senate, where Vice President Kamala Harris gives them one vote to break ties.

Looking back, a number of things set Waxman-Markey’s demise in motion, current and former lawmakers and staff told me. Democrats’ big climate bill was too in the weeds, was introduced when the country was still in a painful economic recession, and wasn’t the top priority. And even though Democrats’ climate bill was modeled on a Republican idea, Republicans pounced on it as a job killer, taking a do-nothing stance on climate in the process.

“It was a very tenuous economic time in a deeper, more profound way than currently,” said John Lawrence, who was chief of staff to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at the time. “It was difficult to figure out where to put a big new controversial bill that looked to some people like it would compound problems impacting the economy rather than alleviating it.”

Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), who was serving on the House Energy and Commerce Committee at the time, said that cap and trade was too complicated for voters to understand. Democrats need to improve their messaging, tying a climate and clean energy agenda to a clear message about jobs, she said.

“Lessons learned [are] that we have to be able to show how we’re protecting working people, how we’re creating new job opportunities, and how we’re protecting the planet,” said Baldwin. “We have to be very proactive, not just policy nerds.”

Ultimately, Waxman-Markey’s failure in 2010 meant that what Obama feared came to pass. The vast majority of Obama’s climate change agenda happened through the executive branch, with regulations on vehicles and electrical appliances, and the creation of the Clean Power Plan. Obama officials assumed that 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton would build on that, but Obama’s successor was instead President Donald Trump.

It hasn’t all been bad. As the Atlantic’s Robinson Meyer recently wrote, the US was still able to hit — even slightly exceed — the carbon emissions targets Waxman-Markey laid out (though, as Meyer points out, it’s impossible to know how much more emissions could have been avoided if the bill had passed). Even then, it still hasn’t been enough to stop the devastating impacts of climate change around the world and in the US.

All of this has convinced climate-minded Democrats that action from Congress is needed to push the US into a clean energy transition. While Podesta told E&E News in 2016 that Waxman-Markey’s failure had shown him that strong executive branch action was the way to go on climate, five years later, he believes that action from Congress is essential, he told me.

Biden “needs a big jolt of federal investment to grease the gears,” Podesta said.

“No climate, no deal”

About a decade after his climate bill failed, Sen. Markey stood in front of reporters on June 15 and laid down a marker on the infrastructure bill President Biden’s administration is currently negotiating with Congress.

“If there is no climate, there is no deal,” Markey said. “There has to be an absolute unbreakable guarantee that climate has to be at the center of any infrastructure deal that we cut.”

There are scant details on what exactly is in a bipartisan infrastructure deal that has the support of 11 Republican and 10 Democratic senators. The bipartisan group is proposing $579 billion in new funding over five years, far less than Biden’s initial $2 trillion American Jobs Plan. But even as the White House continues negotiations, liberal senators are fuming that climate could once again be left out — or significantly diminished — in a final bill.

“While the nods to climate that are in the bipartisan bill are appreciated, they don’t even come close to putting us on a 1.5 [Celsius] degrees trajectory,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), referring to the temperature limit of global warming the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says will avoid the most severe climate impacts, including drastic melting of Arctic sea ice. Whitehouse has been very vocal about his concerns that climate could fall out of an infrastructure deal, tweeting in early June that he was “officially very anxious about climate legislation.”

“We have a planetary emergency that essentially anyone who’s not on the payroll of the fossil fuel industry agrees with,” Whitehouse told me. “Unfortunately, a lot of people around here are on that payroll, so this is the place where it’s difficult.”

The Rhode Island senator is one of a group of about a dozen senators — not including Democratic members of Congress — who have said they will withhold their votes for a bipartisan infrastructure package unless it includes sufficient spending on climate and clean energy.

“Fundamentally, this is the direction the world is going, the economy is going, and the world is going,” said Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN), who is leading an effort to get a clean electricity standard passed as part of an infrastructure bill. “The US can either choose to lead or we can follow.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer vowed this month that he wouldn’t pass an infrastructure package that didn’t “reduce carbon pollution at the scale commensurate with the climate crisis.” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Schumer are charging ahead with a two-pronged strategy: A bipartisan infrastructure bill, and a budget reconciliation package that can be passed with Democrat-only votes, as long as Schumer can keep the caucus united. Sanders told reporters that package could be up to $6 trillion and is expected to contain spending on climate and Biden’s American Families Plan, which includes billions of proposed investment into child care and affordable education.

“There’s no reason to believe that any Republican would be strong on climate,” Sanders, who is the Senate Budget Committee chair, told me. “It has to be obviously in a reconciliation bill, it goes without saying.”

But it might not be that easy. Just relying on reconciliation could contain potential pitfalls; The Senate parliamentarian is charged with interpreting Senate rules, and given the purview to decide what can and cannot be passed using reconciliation. Some moderates are concerned that going it alone on an expensive climate bill will come back and hurt them in the 2022 midterms, which are already expected to be difficult for Democrats. Others fear that every month they spend on these prolonged bipartisan talks exacerbates the time crunch before the 2022 midterms and the risk that they won’t have time even for a one-party bill.

“We are concerned,” Sanders told me, adding that “not a day goes by without negotiations with the parliamentarian.”

What has changed since Waxman-Markey?

Talking to people who have seen decades go by in the Senate with little measurable action on climate, you get guarded optimism that things will be different this time.

For one thing, the impacts of climate change are inescapable in daily life. Those living along the Gulf Coast brace for hurricanes each summer. People living in New England may not have scorching summer temperatures and the forest fires of the West, but the scourge of ticks and Lyme disease and warming Atlantic Ocean temperatures are noticeable. And in the Midwest, it’s the flash floods and strong storms.

“You don’t even have to say ‘climate’ or ‘change,’ you just have to say ‘extreme rain events,’” said Baldwin, referencing storms in 2016 and 2018 that washed out roads. “These are supposedly 500-year events happening two years apart.” 

The politics around climate change — and what to do about it — have changed significantly over the past decade.

With a data set they’ve been building for 13 years, researchers at Yale and George Mason universities used to see about 12 percent of people they classified as “alarmed” about climate and the same amount who were “dismissive” about the issue. Over the years, the numbers have shifted. Those in the alarmed group have grown to about 26 percent (there’s another 29 percent who classify themselves as “concerned” about climate change), while the number in the dismissive category has shrunk to 8 percent.

There’s also widespread support among voters for the US to embrace clean energy. In a December survey, Yale and George Mason researchers found that 66 percent of registered voters said developing sources of clean energy should be a “high” or “very high” priority for the president and Congress. That number was 13 percentage points higher than the number of registered voters who said global warming should be a high or very high priority for the president and Congress, the poll found. And 72 percent of registered voters supported transitioning the US economy from fossil fuels to 100 percent clean energy by 2050. 

Business and industry are also embracing clean energy because it’s become even cheaper than fossil fuels — particularly wind-generated energy, the cost of which has fallen as much as 80 percent in the last 20 years. America’s car companies are phasing out gas-powered vehicles, promising to go all-electric within 10-15 years. Ford CEO Jim Farley recently said that demand for the company’s electric vehicles has been very high, and that the vast majority of their EV customers are new Ford consumers.

And finally, infrastructure — and possibly by extension, clean energy and investments in electric vehicles — is currently sitting at the top of Biden’s legislative priorities.

Republican attacks on climate policy and clean energy are also not as forceful, precisely because industry is starting to embrace it. The GOP is grappling with how to address climate, while also attacking Biden’s climate agenda as one that will kill jobs and deprive people of hamburgers.

“If you’re Kevin McCarthy, you really want the party to be relevant on climate change,” said former South Carolina Rep. Bob Inglis, now the executive director of Republican climate group RepublicEn. “He and others see the numbers, they see young conservatives want action on climate change just like young progressives want action on climate change.”

In a bid to win back suburban districts, McCarthy and House Republicans have released their own climate plan, which involves planting 1 trillion trees and beefing up funding for clean energy research and development. Inglis’s group is working to get the GOP to embrace a carbon tax, which could be easier said than done.

Podesta, Lawrence, and progressive lawmakers think Democrats may have a bigger problem on their hands if they can’t pass a big and bold climate bill, and warn that failing to motivate the base could result in lower Democratic turnout in the 2022 midterms — potentially handing control of Congress to Republicans.

“The Democrats are not going to be able to endure a disaffected base in 2022,” said Lawrence, Pelosi’s former chief of staff. Just like in 2009, House lawmakers still have to deal with “this great big wet blanket that’s the Senate that really squashes the legislation that passes the House,” he added.

If legislation stalls and Democrats lose the midterms, there could well be more years lost in the fight against climate change.

President Joe Biden on Wednesday proposed a $1.8 trillion package that, if passed, would be the largest American investment in child care, paid leave, and early education in recent history — if not ever.

The American Families Plan would work with states to incentivize universal preschool for all 3- and 4-year-olds in the nation, provide two years of free community college to those who want it, make child care more affordable for low- and middle-income families, create a new national program for family and medical leave, and expand the maximum Pell Grant for college by about 20 percent. The plan also provides $800 billion worth of tax relief for families with children: It extends the expanded child tax credit from Biden’s Covid-19 relief package until 2025, and permanently expands Affordable Care Act tax credits to lower health insurance costs for millions of Americans, among other things.

Biden’s plan would make a huge dent in inequality — in a country that currently provides very little government support for American families. The United States stands alone among developed countries in failing to mandate paid leave for new parents, or paid family medical leave. And many other high-income countries subsidize child care and preschool.

Analysis shows the expanded child tax credit alone will cut US child poverty in half, and the expanded child care in Biden’s plan will be welcome for parents — particularly mothers — who have spent the past year attempting to juggle work and caring for children. A recent Washington Post/ABC News poll found that 25 percent of women and 27 percent of workers of color said their family’s financial situation is worse off today than it was before March 2020, when pandemic shutdowns went into effect.

Biden will formally introduce his plan on Wednesday night, during his first speech before a joint session of Congress. There, he’ll also unveil pay-fors for the plan, new tax increases on America’s wealthy, and funding for tax enforcement the administration says will fully pay for these investments in 15 years.

Specifically, the Biden administration is asking Congress to raise taxes on the nation’s wealthiest 1 percent of individuals by returning the top individual income tax rate to 39.6 percent — a reversal of the GOP’s 2017 tax cuts. Administration officials repeatedly underscored that anyone making less than $400,000 per year would be excluded from higher taxes. The tax plan also includes new measures to beef up IRS enforcement to ensure wealthy people who skirt paying their taxes have to pay up.

Child care and paid leave advocates say these investments are important because American parents and other caregivers — the majority of them women — can’t work without them.

“This isn’t just a ‘nice to have,’” Vicki Shabo, senior fellow for paid leave policy and strategy at New America, told Vox. “This is a core economic issue for the country.”

Now, however, it will be up to the Biden administration to take that message to Congress — where multibillion-dollar spending on child care and early education may be a harder sell than roads and bridges. Conservatives have opposed federal funding for child care for decades, arguing that it would threaten American families, and the provisions in the American Families Plan are unlikely to attract Republican support.

There are a lot of details still to be worked out, but many care advocates believe their time is now. The pandemic has shown that “everybody is vulnerable in some way when a serious personal health or caregiving issue strikes,” Shabo said. “All of these issues have become much more relatable as people across region, across family situation, across income, have struggled in one way or another with this really unprecedented moment.”

What’s in the American Families Plan

Biden’s latest plan is the second of his two-plank vision for economic recovery. While the American Jobs Plan focused on building roads and schools, investing in green energy, and supplementing long-term care for older adults and those with disabilities, this twin plan invests in the “human infrastructure” that makes the economy function.

Broadly, the American Families Plan is focused on bringing down the high costs of raising children, attending school and pursuing higher education, and getting health insurance. The plan also contains a number of provisions on nutrition and healthy school meals.

The White House outlined several main points:

• $200 billion for universal preschool for all 3- and 4-year-olds, which the administration estimates would benefit 5 million children and save the average family $13,000. There would be no income cap for this program, according to administration officials.
• $109 billion to offer two free years of community college to all Americans who want it, and an increase of the maximum Pell Grant award by approximately $1,400 per year.
• Biden is calling on Congress to double scholarships for students studying to become teachers from $4,000 to $8,000, and is asking Congress to invest $1.6 billion to help educators get certified in high-cost areas like special education.
• $225 billion to make child care more affordable, fully covering child care costs for the lowest-income working families, and ensuring families earning 1.5 times their state median income pay no more than 7 percent of their income for children under the age of 5.
• $225 billion to creating a national comprehensive paid leave family and medical leave program, providing up to $4,000 a month for workers, with a minimum of two-thirds of average weekly wages replaced. The administration pointed to research that over 30 million workers, including 67 percent of low-wage workers, don’t have access to a single paid sick day.
• $45 billion to expand summer EBT to all eligible children nationwide, expand healthy school meals, support schools that are offering healthy foods, and allow formerly incarcerated individuals to re-enroll in SNAP.
• Biden commits to strengthening and “modernizing” unemployment insurance, including working with Congress on automatic stabilizers — which would automatically adjust the length and amount of UI benefits workers receive if the economy goes into recession, rather than Congress having to reauthorize benefits.
• $800 billion worth of tax credits and cuts for American families and workers, including extending expanded ACA premiums tax credits, making health insurance cheaper for millions; extending the child tax credit increases in Biden’s Covid-19 relief plan through 2025 and making the child tax credit permanently fully refundable; permanently increasing the temporary child and dependent care tax credit; and making the earned income tax credit expansion for childless workers permanent.

To pay for all of this, Biden is proposing:

• Increasing the top tax rate on the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans to 39.6 percent, a reversal of the 2017 GOP tax cut. Biden is also proposing ending capital income tax breaks and other loopholes for households making over $1 million, making them pay the same 39.6 percent rate on all their income.
• Closing a number of other tax loopholes, including accumulated gains loopholes and the carried interest loophole, the latter of which primarily impacts hedge fund partners.
• Increasing IRS funding so that the agency can actually enforce penalties on wealthy Americans who do not pay their taxes. The Biden administration estimates that enforcement alone would raise $700 billion over 10 years.

Some details of this plan may not make it into a final bill when Congress begins drafting. But it shows that the administration is planting its flag on big investments in America’s middle and lower classes — and thinks the upper class should pay for it.

Biden is prioritizing the care economy

The American Families Plan builds on a commitment Biden made on the campaign trail: to take an inclusive view of the country’s economic success that encompassed not just the kinds of manufacturing jobs emphasized by past administrations but also jobs in fields like child care and elder care. These jobs are often done by women, especially women of color, and, since women shoulder the majority of caregiving responsibilities within families, supporting caregiving jobs allows more women to enter the labor force as well.

“When we usually talk about jobs packages, there is a big push on shovel-ready jobs,” Biden said in a speech last July. “But that’s what care jobs are. … The workers are ready now. These jobs can be filled now. Allowing millions of people, primarily women, to get back to work now.”

The first part of the president’s infrastructure package, released in March, included some money for care jobs — namely, $400 billion for home- and community-based health and elder care. But the bulk of the president’s care-economy agenda is contained in the American Families Plan.

The proposed investments have the potential to transform the lives of workers in caregiving jobs and of families who need care. On paid leave, for example, the plan would close a gaping hole in the American social safety net. Before the pandemic, just 20 percent of American private sector workers — and just 8 percent of workers in the bottom quartile of low-wage workers — had access to paid leave to care for a new child or family member, according to the Center for American Progress.

“The lack of access to paid leave in this country keeps women out of the workforce, depresses women’s wages, and means that family members who need care from a family member often can’t get it.” Shabo explained. Meanwhile, “people who have a serious health issue often have to go to work or take unpaid leave,” the latter of which can push them into poverty.

Though many college-educated workers already have paid leave benefits as part of their employment package, the vast majority of workers do not. One estimate put the total of employees who had access to paid family leave at just 13 percent. The American Families Plan would change that, allowing American workers to take paid time to care for a child or recover from an illness, and still return to their jobs.

The plan also has the potential to remake America’s patchwork child care system. Child care in many states currently costs more than tuition at a public university, yet workers in the industry make poverty-level wages, around $11 an hour. The American Rescue Plan, the Covid-19 stimulus bill signed in March, contained $39 billion to help the child care industry weather the immediate challenge of the pandemic, but it wasn’t enough to fundamentally change the system for the future. Funding at the level of the American Families Plan, however, “sends a signal to states and to the field that this is an intended long-term investment,” Rhian Allvin, CEO of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, told Vox.

Indeed, the plan would ensure that families making under 1.5 times a state’s median income pay no more than 7 percent of their income on child care, while the lowest-income families would pay nothing. Meanwhile, it would raise wages for child care workers to $15 an hour, or to parity with kindergarten teachers if workers have similar qualifications.

Such reforms would be an enormous boon to child care workers, the majority of whom are women and 40 percent of whom are women of color. They would also help more mothers — who still do the majority of child care in families — work outside the home. That’s especially consequential during a pandemic that has led millions of women to leave the labor force, many of them due to a lack of child care.

That’s one of the many reasons experts say it makes sense to think about caregiving as part of any economic or infrastructure plan. “Without a robust care infrastructure, we’re essentially choosing to bench half our labor market,” Rakeen Mabud, managing director of policy and research and chief economist at Groundwork Collaborative, told Vox.

The American Families Plan could have a tough road ahead in Congress

Some advocates are concerned that the American Families Plan could be less politically palatable to conservatives and moderates in Congress than the infrastructure-focused American Jobs Plan.

It’s yet to be seen whether Democrats will attempt to pass these packages piecemeal or roll them up into one giant piece of budget reconciliation legislation that could be passed without Republican support. Democrats passed Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid relief plan with budget reconciliation and are considering the same with infrastructure.

Either way, the child care and paid leave portions of the president’s agenda could fall by the wayside in congressional negotiations, whether it’s because moderates will object to lumping everything together or because they don’t want to vote for a third package that adds another nearly $2 trillion in spending.

“Getting the infrastructure provisions done is going to be hard enough, because Republicans may not want to play ball,” Jim Manley, who was an aide to then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, told the Washington Post. “But getting the other domestic spending plans over the finish line is going to be a heck of a lot tougher.”

Some fear that by splitting up the plans, the White House might have increased the likelihood that child care and other centerpieces of the second plan get left behind, especially since long-term care made it into the American Jobs Plan. Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) expressed concern at a summit in March that a point could come when “golly gee, there’s no money left to help make it possible for women to recover economically.”

After a recent ruling from Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough, Democrats can pass two more budget reconciliation packages this fiscal year. However, this strategy is unprecedented and relatively untested, and is likely to prompt a negative reaction from Senate institutionalists.

Progressives like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) say they want to keep infrastructure and child care in one large package.

“For people to go to work, we need roads and bridges and child care,” Warren told reporters recently. “And we need a jobs package that produces jobs for men, which is often in the roads and bridges construction, and for women, which is often in child care. We need it all, and I think it should be in one package.”

Correction, April 28, 2021: An earlier version of this article misstated the amount the Biden administration is proposing to invest in child care under the American Families Plan. The amount is $225 billion.

The Biden administration’s theory of policy so far is to go big. The same goes for its politics.

Taken together, President Joe Biden’s $2.25 trillion American Jobs Plan and newly introduced $1.8 trillion American Families Plan come out to slightly over $4 trillion in proposed new spending. It’s an enormous investment in American job creation; the last bipartisan infrastructure bill Congress passed in 2015 clocked in at about $305 billion — about one-thirteenth the size of Biden’s proposed plan. And Obama’s $800 billion stimulus plan of 2009 was about one-fifth of Biden’s plan, not even taking into account the $1.9 trillion in Covid-19 relief that has already been signed into law.

That sheer amount of proposed federal funding is meant to do a lot of things, but the main goal is to get as many jobs to as many people in as many voter constituencies as possible. Under Biden’s plan, infrastructure no longer calls to mind images of white men in hard hats; it includes working mothers, home health aides who care for the nation’s elderly, and workers of color across the nation. Women and people of color were crucial to Biden’s presidential win, and they are also crucial elements in his jobs plan.

“We talk about the working middle class as white men in pickup trucks in Ohio, but they’re really Black and brown workers that are keeping our economy afloat,” said longtime Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha, who is advising the pro-Biden outside group Building Back Together on outreach to Latino voters.

Republicans are making a bet that the sheer size of Biden’s collective “Build Back Better” agenda could be a problem for him, and that voters will be turned off by trillions of dollars in new spending. Congressional Republicans have pitched a package that’s about a quarter of the size of Biden’s American Jobs Plan. Meanwhile, prominent progressives including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) want Biden to go as big as $10 trillion in infrastructure spending over the next decade.

But the White House and Democrats are already building a public case that infrastructure accounts for a lot more than roads and bridges. They seem to have had success so far; numerous pollsters Vox interviewed said “infrastructure” is a nebulous concept to many voters.

“What people don’t realize is that the majority of voters don’t know what infrastructure is to begin with,” said veteran Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, who advised and polled for Biden’s presidential campaign. “The caregiving situation is as critical as the road you drive on to get to work. The Covid experience has really brought that home.”

“Jobs,” on the other hand, is a term that voters understand well. And Biden’s massive plan — funded by raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations — is jobs creation on steroids.

Democrats are arguing infrastructure is more than transportation

Historically, the word infrastructure has called to mind very male-dominated jobs: Construction, manufacturing, and maintenance, getting shovels in the ground. Indeed, just 10 percent of construction jobs are held by women.

Multiple experts told Vox that if roads and bridges are the physical infrastructure Americans need to get to work, the Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare a long-existing reality about the lack of “human infrastructure” in the US. Often, affordable child care or elder care makes all the difference as to whether women with care obligations are able to work at all.

“Without a robust care infrastructure, we’re essentially choosing to bench half our labor market,” Rakeen Mabud, managing director of policy and research and chief economist at Groundwork Collaborative, told Vox. “The fact we’re even having a debate of whether or not care is infrastructure … is so deeply rooted in racialized and gendered deservingness.”

Biden’s American Jobs Plan contains $400 billion specifically to lower the costs of long-term care for elderly and disabled patients, keeping them in their homes. But it also aims to raise the low wages of home heath aides and caregivers themselves, who are predominantly Black and brown women.

“Receiving the respect, recognition and compensation they are due is not only essential and necessary, but it is just the beginning of what we must do to address the long history of racial exclusion that this workforce has faced,” Ai-jen Poo, the co-founder and executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, told Vox.

The Biden administration also employs a number of progressive economists who have spent their careers focusing on how to make the US economy more equal for women and workers of color. Mabud’s argument is echoed within the administration by people like Janelle Jones, who formerly led policy and research at Groundwork Collaborative and is now the chief economist for the US Department of Labor.

“I think the pandemic and this recession have shown that … an economy built on the structural flaws of racism and inequality is less stable for everyone,” Jones said during a recent interview with NPR. “It really has shown that when we have an economy that is just the rich getting richer and everyone else doing worse off — we’re all worse off.”

The Covid-19 pandemic has made this situation acute. Data shows that women and workers of color were forced out of the labor market, owing to lower-wage jobs being more likely to be cut during the pandemic, and women being unable to work while also providing at-home school and care for their children.

This makes good policy sense for Biden, but it’s also good political sense. Biden’s base is diverse; his presidential win and Democrats’ surprise wins in Georgia were powered by women and voters of color alike. Appealing to a large base that government policy has left behind for decades is a shrewd political move ahead of the 2022 midterms.

It’s also responding to the current moment. A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 25 percent of women and 27 percent of workers of color said their family’s financial situation is worse off today than it was before March 2020, when pandemic shutdowns went into effect. The survey also found that middle-aged and younger women were impacted more, with 29 percent of women younger than 65 saying they are financially worse off today, compared to 10 percent of women who are 65 and older.

As the New York Times’s David Leonhardt writes, recent US census data showed the US birth rate grew by just 7.4 percent over the last decade, the smallest increase since the Depression-era 1930s. One of the big reasons could be the high cost of raising children, coupled with relatively modest income increases in the US that often aren’t enough to compete with rising costs.

“The decline in the birthrate, in other words, is partly a reflection of American society’s failure to support families,” Leonhardt wrote. Biden’s American Families Plan is a bid to fix that.

Finally, while the current unemployment rate is hovering around 6 percent, it’s a different scenario for workers of color in the United States. Unemployment for Black workers is 9.6 percent, while unemployment for Latino workers is around 7.9 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And top economic officials including Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell say this is likely an undercount; workers who dropped out of the workforce altogether to school their children at home wouldn’t necessarily be captured by these statistics because they are not actively looking for work. The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic was unequal, and the US recovery continues to be.

“We’re not just coming out of a crisis, we’re rebuilding from decades of disinvestment,” said Mabud. “We know women have been hit hardest in this crisis, and Black and Latinx women in particular. We can’t stop until we see a full recovery and then some for women.”

The public is receptive to Biden’s large proposals

A range of polling shows that Biden’s expansive view of what counts as infrastructure has fairly broad support among the American public.

A recent NBC News poll found that 59 percent of respondents supported Biden’s American Jobs Plan. A recent Vox and Data for Progress poll found that 68 percent of likely voters support the plan. And a Monmouth University poll released Monday found 68 percent of respondents supported Biden’s infrastructure bill, with another 64 percent supportive of the ideas in Biden’s American Families Plan, which aims to make child care, higher education, and health care more affordable.

As Republicans and Democrats argue over the semantics of what constitutes “infrastructure,” Monmouth polling director Patrick Murray told Vox that Biden’s broad brush does not appear to be turning off voters so far.

For instance, Vox and Data for Progress polling found that a majority of likely voters of all parties supported Biden’s proposal of putting $400 billion into bringing down the costs of long-term care: 88 percent of Democrats, 72 percent of independents, and 55 percent of Republicans support the idea. And recent polling from Politico and Morning Consult shows that a large majority of Black voters support Biden’s pledge to increase housing options for low-income Americans; 80 percent of Black voters support that measure, and 58 percent “strongly” support it.

In other words, voters seem to care more about things that directly impact their lives than they do about whether these things meet a strict definition of “infrastructure.”

“[Biden] understood that just a straightforward infrastructure plan on roads and bridges was not going to sell as well as a broader plan where people could see a potential benefit coming directly to them,” Murray told Vox. “He knows he’s not going to get support from Republicans on this; certainly not on the Hill. But he might try to build Republican support in the public once these things start rolling out.”

Murray noted that though support for Biden’s plan is split along party lines, about one-third of Republicans support his plans, which is not extremely low. The pollster also cautioned that the problem that former President Barack Obama and Vice President Biden encountered with the 2009 stimulus bill was too small. Their initial plan polled well, but that changed after it was watered down to appease congressional Republicans.

“By the end of 2009, it tanked in public opinion,” Murray said. “What the public was asking at that point was, ‘What’s in it for me?’” The Biden administration appears to have absorbed this important lesson of the Obama era.

Both Murray and Cameron Easley, senior editor at Morning Consult, noted that Biden’s plan goes up in popularity when poll respondents are told it will be paid for with higher taxes on corporations and America’s wealthy. Easley told Vox that “pay-for” seems more popular among voters than deficit spending, where the government continues to borrow rather than pay for its plans outright. The popularity of raising corporate taxes also complicates congressional Republican opposition to the plan.

Easley said the public would “much rather fund it by hiking taxes on corporations or the rich than they would by deficit spending.”

Trying to define infrastructure as roads and bridges could be a problem for Republicans

Republicans struggled to effectively attack Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill in large part because the bill — which included $1,400 stimulus checks — was popular with their constituents.

Now, “it seems Republicans have had trouble finding an effective message on infrastructure like they have had finding an effective message on Covid relief,” Easley told Vox.

So far, the main Republican attack on Biden’s American Jobs Plan is that it takes too expansive a view of infrastructure, which Republicans more narrowly define as conventional transportation infrastructure, along with broadband access. Last week, Senate Republicans unveiled a $568 billion counteroffer, which they see as the starting point of their negotiations with the White House.

“What do people think of in our states when they think of infrastructure? Roads and bridges; public transit systems; rail — which could be cargo, passenger rail; water and wastewater …ports and inland waterways; airports; broadband,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) said at a press conference.

The Monmouth University poll found that a majority of voters equally favor Biden’s plan to spend heavily on infrastructure and his plan to spend on child care, health care, and education; 54 percent said both plans were equally important, compared to 19 percent who said infrastructure was more important and 21 percent who said a plan to extend health care and child care was more important.

Rocha, the political strategist focusing on outreach to Latinos, says he’s advising Democrats to scrap the word “infrastructure” and focus with laser-like intensity on jobs.

“When talking to voters, you should always use the word ‘jobs,’” Rocha said. “Infrastructure is just something that sits out there that people don’t understand. What I am advising all Democrats is to talk about American jobs.”

Ultimately, some Democrats anticipate the most effective Republican attack may be about the overall price tag of Biden’s cumulative plans. The nearly $4 trillion in proposed spending, plus the $1.8 trillion already out the door, will likely be featured in GOP attack ads.

“Where we have to win in the debate is the pay-for,” said Democratic strategist Molly Murphy. “Republicans are basically just going to say it’s a lie, there’s no way to pay for this without raising middle-class taxes, you’ll just pay for it. They will talk about how expensive this is the whole way through.”

But Murphy noted Republicans will also have to navigate the fact that paying for these plans by raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy — the thing they dislike the most — is also popular with voters.

“Right now, Americans believe this can be paid for by raising taxes on the wealthy, which they support,” Murphy said. “We need to keep it that way.”

The dire warning implicit in President Joe Biden’s more than $2 trillion American Jobs Plan — which promises to rebuild American infrastructure, create union jobs, and jump-start manufacturing — is that if it fails to become law, China will outcompete the United States for decades to come.

Biden has been saying that China is “eating our lunch” for months, promising his plan would “put us in a position to win the global competition with China in the upcoming years.”

“This is not part of my speech,” he said during April 7 remarks to sell his plan, “but I promise you, you’re all going to be reporting over the next six to eight months how China and the rest of the world is racing ahead of us in the investments they have in the future, attempting to own the future.”

Mentioning China so often when talking about a domestic infrastructure plan might seem odd. But it makes sense if you realize that Biden’s signature domestic economic policy plan is also a critical element of a broader foreign policy strategy to thwart China’s growing power and global influence.

“When [Biden’s] thinking about the infrastructure investments necessary, a lot of it is in contraposition to what he is seeing China doing in terms of strategic investments,” National Economic Council director Brian Deese recently told the New York Times’s Ezra Klein.

The idea is that making America more economically competitive by improving domestic infrastructure and investing in new and emerging technologies, especially clean energy technology, is the best way the US can challenge China for supremacy on the world stage — even more so than through military might or by trying to win the “war of ideas” against China’s authoritarianism.

Competing with China is fundamental to Biden’s presidency and goes hand in hand with his promise to bring middle-class jobs back to the United States. Biden envisions those jobs in manufacturing electric vehicles in Detroit, and long-duration energy storage that can store the clean energy generated from wind and solar, among other jobs in the clean energy economy.

Yet the constant framing of China as America’s greatest competitor, if not outright foe, is not without its hazards.

Anti-China sentiment and hate crimes against Asian Americans are on the rise in the United States, in large part due to former President Donald Trump’s aggressive anti-China rhetoric and posture, and in particular his insistence on using racist and xenophobic language to blame China for the Covid-19 pandemic.

Though Biden and Trump may agree on the goal of making America more competitive with — and stronger than — China, Biden seems to recognize the need to be more careful in his messaging. The president has strongly condemned hate crimes against Asian Americans, calling such violence “un-American.”

Asian Americans have “been attacked, blamed, scapegoated, and harassed,” Biden said in a White House address on the one-year anniversary of the coronavirus being declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization. “They’ve been verbally assaulted, physically assaulted, killed. … It’s wrong. It’s un-American, and it must stop.”

Still, hammering home the critical importance of competing against China without painting the country as a threat could be a tricky line for him to walk.

The coming weeks will determine whether Biden’s big domestic and foreign policy gamble pays off. If it doesn’t, Biden will have suffered a loss on two fronts.

China’s infrastructure spending vastly outmatches that of the United States

Biden’s refrain about China “eating America’s lunch” has a lot to do with just how much China has spent in recent years to improve its domestic infrastructure to become more competitive in the world economy.

China’s years-long investment in domestic infrastructure has produced a sprawling network of high-speed train lines, at least 1 million bridges, and entire cities springing up — sometimes without enough people to fill them.

China spends more than three times what the US does on infrastructure: about 8 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP), versus just 2.4 percent of GDP in the US, according to a 2017 report by the consulting firm Deloitte.

In 2020, China’s investment in infrastructure, buildings, and other projects totaled around $8 trillion US, according to China’s National Bureau of Statistics. Meanwhile, the US federal government spent $63 billion directly on infrastructure projects in 2020, granting an additional $83 billion in infrastructure funding to states — a total of $146 billion. In other words, the US invested a small fraction of China’s total spending for the year.

Biden’s $2.25 trillion American Jobs Plan will amount to about 1 percent of America’s GDP per year over about eight years, according to a Biden administration official. But even with that factored in, US spending pales in comparison to China’s.

“Right now, China doesn’t need to invest that much more; it has a brand new infrastructure that’s already been built,” Kelly Sims Gallagher, a professor of energy and environmental policy at Tufts University, who served as a senior China adviser in the Obama administration’s Special Envoy for Climate Change office, told Vox.

In comparison, she said, “we need to rebuild the original infrastructure, which is old and outdated, we need to climate-proof that infrastructure, and we need to be competing with China internationally for those global markets.”

Biden’s plan is a lot more than the $621 billion in spending dedicated to rebuilding what is traditionally considered “infrastructure”: the nation’s roads, bridges, ports, and rail systems. It also contains $300 billion to bolster manufacturing, $213 billion for affordable housing, and a collective $380 billion for research and development, modernizing America’s electricity grid, and installing high-speed broadband around the country. The plan also includes $400 billion for home- and community-based health and elder care.

Biden administration officials have been explicit that they see this plan as a major driver of job growth in the United States across multiple sectors, including construction, manufacturing, and energy. They frequently tout the sheer size of the plan, with Biden calling it the “single largest investment in American jobs since World War II.” And with a $2 trillion federal investment, the Biden administration is betting the private sector will spur even more job growth.

“Part of the economic logic of this plan is that this is not just about infrastructure, but it’s about creating more jobs and more industrial strength in the United States,” a Biden administration official told reporters. “When you make these infrastructure investments and couple it with the president’s commitment to buy American, you’re pulling forward and creating demand that will help accelerate new industries in the US.”

What the US lacks in manufacturing capacity, it can make up for in cutting edge research and development, experts told Vox. Especially when it comes to clean energy technologies that will power the world for years to come, the Biden administration sees an opening.

“The US needs to think strategically about what is our role in developing … essentially the next generation of these technologies, because we’re never going to compete with China on pure manufacturing scale,” Joanna Lewis, director of the science, technology and international affairs program at Georgetown University and an expert on US-China relations, told Vox.

Biden’s China push differs from Obama’s and Trump’s

Engagement with China, meaning consistent and significant dialogue on areas of mutual interest, has defined Washington-Beijing relations since the Nixon era. Presidents from both parties wanted China to become a “responsible stakeholder,” a wonky Washington term that mostly means they hoped Beijing would abide by global, cooperative rules even as it gained immense power. In effect, they wanted to make China act more like America.

That bipartisan consensus started to fall apart in President Barack Obama’s second term as China relentlessly began cyberespionage and hacks of the US government. But more importantly, Obama used beating China economically as his main selling point for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation free trade deal representing roughly 40 percent of the world’s GDP.

The objective of the deal was to partner with other countries in the region to reduce China’s influence. But that deal became mired in domestic politics: Unions, some progressives, and some on the right opposed it. The deal eventually collapsed under congressional pressure. Neither Democratic presidential challenger Hillary Clinton nor Republican nominee Donald Trump engaged with it during the campaign.

As president, Trump took it up a notch and pushed an approach that viewed China more as an enemy than a competitor.

Instead of working with allies to box China in, the US would make a series of moves to derail Beijing’s economic future. “Trump looked to reduce China’s ability to compete, whether it was in cyber, tech, or economics,” said John Costello, who served as a top Commerce Department official for intelligence and security in the Trump administration.

He launched a multibillion-dollar trade war; aimed to downgrade China’s prevalence in the supply chains of many industries, like putting pressure on Apple to move its products from factories in China to factories in Vietnam; and restricted the access of Chinese telecommunications companies such as Huawei and ZTE.

Trump’s plan was to wield America’s might to stymie China’s economic influence in the world. Only then, really, would the US have a shot at competing. However, studies showed that the trade war he launched hurt America’s ability to get protective equipment during the pandemic, the manufacturing job losses hurt primarily people of color, and the virus’s origination in Wuhan, China, fueled anti-Asian sentiment that persists to this day.

For Biden, neither the Obama nor the Trump approach was quite right, and both failed in important ways. Obama’s international play fell flat but barely addressed economic needs at home. Trump aimed to revamp the domestic economy but did little to rally the world to counter Beijing comprehensively.

The new president’s approach, then, picks up where the last two strategies failed. “What the Biden administration is doing by broadening the way we discuss infrastructure is painting a picture of the future in which some of the constraints on our current infrastructure go away and new possibilities are realized,” said Anthony Foxx, the secretary of transportation from 2013 to 2017.

Biden’s is essentially a two-pronged approach. The first is the domestic piece, which experts explain is about essentially beating China in a domestic race for new technologies. “It’s all about running faster,” said Costello, now a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security think tank in Washington.

That’s going to be tough, as China remains determined to fund domestic projects and critical technologies, like artificial intelligence, that will keep the race with America close for years.

“China is ramping up AI investment, research, and entrepreneurship on a historic scale,” wrote Kai-Fu Lee, chair and CEO of the China-based technology firm Sinovation Ventures, in his 2018 book AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order. Beijing “projected that by 2030, China would become the center of global innovation in artificial intelligence, leading in theory, technology, and application.”

But there’s a larger point to this domestic-focused plan. China’s government says that only an authoritarian nation can move at the speed required to “win the future.” Simply put, a strongman like Xi Jinping can dictate where and how much to invest in key industries faster than Biden can get Congress to approve proposals. With this infrastructure bill, Biden wants to prove democracies can still make big moves to outcompete the Chinas of the world.

“The autocrats are betting on democracy not being able to generate the kind of unity needed to make decisions to get in that race,” Biden said during an April 7 press conference. “We can’t afford to prove them right. We have to show the world — and, much more importantly, we have to show ourselves — that democracy works; that we can come together on the big things. It’s the United States of America for God’s sake.”

The second part is the global one plucked from the Obama playbook. But instead of an economic super-deal, Biden wants nations to work together to counter China’s aggressive behavior. That means banning Beijing’s telecommunications companies from their critical infrastructure, speaking out against China’s human rights abuses against Uyghur Muslims or Hong Kong, and pushing Xi to agree to bold climate change standards.

Despite its immense power, Biden’s thinking goes, the US can’t compel China to change in these areas unless and until America’s allies also stand against it. That, too, will be a difficult task. For example, the European Union and China are still finalizing a trade deal that would give Beijing preferential access to the EU’s market.

The Biden administration is against such a pact because they argue it sends China a signal that it can still make lucrative deals with democracies even as it erodes democracy back home.

The agreement, however, may not go through after sanctions the US and the EU placed on Chinese officials over mistreatment of the Uyghurs led Beijing to retaliate with sanctions of its own on EU officials. The continent’s leaders are still steaming over that move. “The prospects for … ratification will depend on how the situation evolves,” Valdis Dombrovskis, the EU’s trade commissioner, told the Financial Times in March.

Still, the key part of Biden’s China strategy is the domestic part, and the American Jobs Plan is the centerpiece of it. Now the president just has to convince Congress that it’s the right play.

Framing infrastructure as competing with China could get more GOP support

It’s still an open question whether there’s enough political will to pass Biden’s $2.25 trillion infrastructure and jobs plan. With Republicans wanting a smaller bill, some Democrats think the best way to get Biden’s plan through Congress is to hammer at the China competition angle with Republicans.

“The best way to enact a progressive agenda is to use China [as a] threat,” a Democratic congressional aide told Vox.

The theory that America is at its best when it’s united against a common adversary can motivate members of both parties, especially using the idea that the US will lose its competitive edge or cede ground to another country. Indeed, one of the few things both parties can agree on is the need to compete with China.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee will soon formally introduce a bipartisan bill called the Strategic Competition Act, which focuses on countering China’s human rights abuses, prioritizing security assistance for the Indo-Pacific region, and combating intellectual property theft. And Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has called on committees to work on the bipartisan Endless Frontiers Act, which focuses especially on strengthening the US semiconductor industry.

“It seems to have some rhetorical benefit that other people have this great thing that we don’t have,” said Deborah Seligsohn, assistant professor of political science at Villanova University. “We somehow need to create a Sputnik era to have nice things,” she added, referring to decades of competition between the US and Soviet Russia over the countries’ dueling space programs.

At the same time, calling China a threat or adversary could have damaging — even dangerous — consequences in the United States. Amid a spike of hateful rhetoric and violence against Asian Americans across the country, Democrats say they recognize the need to make a big distinction between competing with the Chinese government to not cede economic ground, and portraying the Chinese people as enemies.

The US Senate is deliberating on a bill, aimed at combating Asian American hate crimes, that has bipartisan support, and Biden is ramping up his own outreach to the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus (CAPAC), meeting with them in mid-April.

“We need to stand by the AAPI [Asian American and Pacific Islander] community as a whole-of-government response with what we have to get done,” Biden told Asian American lawmakers at the CAPAC meeting.