SOTU infrastructure pitch

Lawmakers question price tag of Trump’s SOTU infrastructure pitch

By ELANA SCHOR and SEUNG MIN KIM

President Donald Trump made a fresh plea Tuesday night for bipartisanship on rebuilding the nation's crumbling roads and bridges. But lawmakers in both parties left his State of the Union still wondering about how Trump wants to pay for it.

Trump's infrastructure agenda, long seen as a natural fit for the New York developer, envisions a public investment of $200 billion that could be used to attract private-sector as well as state and local spending. The president asked Congress in his speech "to produce a bill that generates at least $1.5 trillion" for infrastructure.

But Republicans and Democrats alike expressed disappointment with the lack of details.

"The question is, how are you gonna pay for it?” Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) told reporters. “You tell me how we pay for it and I’ll tell you what we can do … leveraging private dollars is a good start but we got a lot of work to do."

Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) said that "$1.5 trillion, I think, kind of sucked the oxygen out of the room for a moment, as no one expected a number that big."

“And the obvious thing is, where are we with debt and deficit and how are we going to be able to pull it together?" he asked.

Trump told lawmakers that any federal spending "should be leveraged by partnering with state and local governments and, where appropriate, tapping into private sector investment." Congressional Republicans are considering a strategy that would set aside infrastructure money as part of a broader deal to raise budget caps for domestic programs, but those talks remain in their early stages.

Hours before Trump's speech, Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) pressed Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on another approach to pay for legislation on shoring up the nation's creaky foundations: using proceeds from income repatriated under the GOP tax bill. Mnuchin called Kennedy's pitch a “terrific idea” during a committee hearing, which cheered the genial Louisianan.

“We all know we need more infrastructure,” Kennedy said. “I would love to get some more details about what the president is thinking in terms of how we pay for it.”

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) welcomed Trump's invocation of infrastructure but also said she wanted to hear more details on how the White House plans to pay for the plan. When Trump mentioned a $1 trillion-plus investment, she said, “you could sort of hear the rumble in the room on that.”

Capito added that she had hoped to hear more about expanding broadband, a top priority for rural states such as hers.

On the Democratic side of the aisle, the confusion was even deeper over how Trump would find the new revenue to pay for an infrastructure bill that Republicans are already hoping to use as a political cudgel against Democrats in close races this fall.

"Where’s that trillion and a half coming from? Was that the trillion and a half he added to the national debt with the tax bill?” Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) asked. “Where’s that coming from?"

Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware, the top Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee, pointed out in a statement that Trump's planned trillion-dollar boost to infrastructure is "the same promise he made to the American people in his speech last year – but tomorrow we will still be waiting for his long overdue plan to do so."