Biden’s big-spending infrastructure bill delivers little on key items – Washington Examiner

A massive program to expand rural broadband access has failed so far to connect any homes to the internet. A push to electrify school bus fleets has proved costly and inefficient. And a multibillion-dollar effort to build thousands of electric vehicle charging stations across the country has so far yielded just a handful of stations.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act contained $1.2 trillion in spending on what the White House called “a once-in-a-generation investment in our nation’s infrastructure and competitiveness.” 

But critics say the progressive goals of the Biden-Harris administration held back the law from delivering sweeping updates to the nation’s infrastructure. 

“I was very skeptical that it would actually deliver those kinds of results,” David Ditch, senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, told the Washington Examiner. “It has dramatically underperformed even my low expectations, and there’s a lot of reasons for that.”

“No. 1 is the Biden administration has been absolutely determined to apply as many different left-wing mandates as it can cram in,” Ditch added.

From “environmental justice” considerations to equity requirements for contractors, many programs created by the infrastructure bill came with progressive stipulations for how they should be implemented. The result has been slow progress on spending enormous sums of money, with little to show for some efforts after nearly three years.

“The evidence of these programs being a complete failure is that none of the recipients, grantees, have featured in a [Kamala] Harris commercial or onstage,” Daniel Turner, executive director at Power the Future, told the Washington Examiner. “If you received a benefit from the infrastructure bill or the Inflation Reduction Act, you would be front and center saying, ‘Thank you, madame vice president, for this program.’”

Instead, the infrastructure bill has made few appearances in Harris’s campaign rhetoric as she seeks to distance herself from Biden.

$42 billion rural broadband bungle

The infrastructure bill created a program called Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment, or BEAD, that aimed to expand internet access in underserved communities.

More than 1,000 days later, the program has not connected anyone to the internet, Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr said on Wednesday, citing a congressional letter.

Carr excoriated the massive initiative in testimony to Congress in July.

“The Biden administration is using this $42 billion program to pursue a climate change agenda, DEI requirements, technology biases, price controls, preferences for government-run networks, and rules that will undoubtedly lead to wasteful overbuilding,” Carr said.

“It has now been 967 days since President Biden signed this $42 billion plan into law. And today, not one person has been connected to the internet with those dollars — not one home, not one business,” he added. “Indeed, not even one shovel worth of dirt has been turned with those dollars.”

Critics blame the Biden-Harris administration’s requirements for contractors in part for the sluggish movement of BEAD.

For example, applicants for BEAD funds must identify how they are planning “to remedy inequities and barriers to inclusion” and demonstrate that they have conducted outreach “to underrepresented communities and unions and worker organizations.” The program also encourages states applying for the money “to promote participation by minority-owned businesses and other socially or economically disadvantaged individual-owned businesses.”

“Some of the environmental justice and DEI requirements to award these contracts are unable to be fulfilled because there are not enough minority-owned cable layers in rural Midwestern states,” Turner said. “They just don’t exist.”

Critics also blame the federal government’s insistence on pursuing less effective, more expensive technology, such as fiber-optic cable, to build out rural broadband access, and they point to the overlapping efforts across the federal government as opportunities for wasteful spending.

“There are already so many different programs from so many different agencies to subsidize broadband, especially in rural households,” Ditch said. 

“There are better alternatives, such as Elon Musk’s Starlink program, that could be delivered for a fraction of the cost, but we’re not choosing to do that,” he added, referring to the technology billionaire’s satellite internet company.

A spokesperson for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration told the Washington Examiner that the agency, which is housed within the Department of Commerce, has to date approved 49 initial proposals for projects funded under BEAD.

“BEAD complies with the directives and timeline laid out by Congress in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and enforcing those directives has not put the program off track,” the spokesperson said. “Rather, it is helping to avoid the kind of waste and fraud that has plagued other recent internet infrastructure programs — precisely what Congress intended.”

Electric school bus $5 billion boondoggle

The infrastructure bill set aside $5 billion to replace existing school buses across the country with “clean” school buses over a five-year period.

But the program appears to have run into delays and complications from real-world conditions that made those school buses costly and impractical for many districts.

A report published last week by the House Energy and Commerce Oversight Subcommittee found the Environmental Protection Agency’s “poor execution” of the Clean School Bus Program established by the infrastructure law included pushing schools that had no nearby chargers to purchase electric school buses that frequently broke down.

The electric school buses cost up to $300,000 more than traditional diesel buses, the report found, and some schools applied for the federal funding for the new buses without understanding the additional costs associated with running them, such as the price of the chargers.

Weather conditions can also affect the performance of electric school buses, which don’t work as well in very hot or cold climates. The infrastructure bill nonetheless encourages school districts nationwide to adopt electric school buses.

Even before the Biden-Harris administration started administering the program, states that had previously attempted to transition to electric school buses faced challenges. Rural school districts in particular have struggled to make the clean technology work.

For example, in a rural California school district under pressure from a state law to transition to zero-emission buses in the coming decade, “officials say their four battery-powered buses can go at most 93 miles on a full charge in peak weather conditions,” the Los Angeles Times reported last year.

“The buses mostly stay parked,” the Los Angeles Times reported. 

Other real-world conditions could make the billions of dollars spent on electrifying school bus fleets even more wasteful.

Some districts are suffering from school bus driver shortages that have made providing existing bus service difficult. School bus driver employment fell by more than 15% between 2019 and 2023, according to the Economic Policy Institute. 

Earlier this year, Chicago Public Schools touted the $20 million it received from the EPA through the infrastructure bill’s program to purchase as many as 50 electric school buses over the next three years. The Chicago Teachers Union celebrated the move.

But the district is already struggling to find drivers for the buses it has. Less than two months before the announcement of the purchase of the electric school buses, the district’s chief operating officer said Chicago Public Schools only had 54% of the bus drivers it needed. More than 5,000 previously eligible students were cut from bus services at the start of the last academic year amid the driver shortages, Chalkbeat Chicago reported. 

The federal government has continued buying new, expensive buses for districts anyway.

Electric vehicle charger challenges

The bipartisan infrastructure bill also set aside $7.5 billion to build tens of thousands of electric vehicle charging stations around the country. 

Proponents of the investment said the lack of a robust charging infrastructure has discouraged people from buying more electric cars because drivers may worry about their ability to travel long distances in between charging stations.

The Biden-Harris administration has said its goal is to help facilitate the construction of 500,000 chargers by 2030.  

But as of this spring, the program had resulted in the construction of just seven charging stations, the Washington Post reported. The headline drew widespread scrutiny to the issue at the time.

The Federal Highway Administration told the Washington Examiner that 19 charging stations across nine states are currently operational, with more projects in various stages of development.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg defended the slow pace of construction on electric vehicle chargers, acknowledging earlier this year that just the “very first handful” of stations has been built.

“In order to do a charger, it’s more than just plunking a small device into the ground,” Buttigieg said on CBS’s Face the Nation in May. “There’s utility work, and this is also, really, a new category of federal investment.”

Some of the same factors that have hamstrung other infrastructure projects, such as the requirements for contractors, have slowed the rollout of the charging stations. Republican lawmakers said in a letter to Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm in February that delivery delays and labor requirements had kept stations from being built.

Another part of the problem involves where the money for the charging stations is deployed.

Ditch noted that because of the Biden-Harris administration’s Justice40 Initiative, which requires 40% of climate spending to go to “disadvantaged communities,” the spending on chargers isn’t necessarily matching up with where the electric cars are.

“The administration is devoting a portion of subsidies for electric vehicle charging stations to ‘disadvantaged’ areas based on Justice40, even though the ownership and usage of such vehicles is clustered in high-wealth areas,” Ditch said.

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But the administration’s criteria for deciding which areas are “disadvantaged” also allows the program to subsidize charging stations in elite neighborhoods, he noted.

A federal government formula that allows an area to be considered low income if its median income falls significantly below the median income of the surrounding area allowed Martha’s Vineyard and parts of Cape Cod to fall under the eligibility standard for building charging stations in disadvantaged places, the Daily Caller found.