Capito, her party’s leader on the Environment and Public Works Committee, said she hoped the proposal would be a starting point for negotiations with the White House.
On transportation funding, the two plans at first glance might not look so far apart, proposing something close to a half-trillion dollars in spending. But there’s a key difference.
Directly comparing each aspect of the plans is tricky, in part because neither is fully fleshed out.
There also are major elements of Biden’s plan that Republicans are not proposing to fund or which don’t neatly compare with existing transportation spending. That includes $100 billion in incentives for people to buy electric vehicles; $20 billion to pay for electric school buses; $25 billion to aid minority communities harmed by past infrastructure spending; and a $25 billion program to fund the largest of transportation projects.
Jeff Davis, a senior fellow at the Eno Center for Transportation — a Washington-based nonprofit that analyzes transportation policy — examined what Biden and Senate Republicans are proposing to spend on roads, transit, rail, airports and safety programs over five years, calculating the numbers at $720 billion and $437 billion, respectively. If Congress simply maintained current funding levels adjusted for inflation, the spending in those buckets would total $375 billion over five years. Here’s how that five-year spending breaks down.