Heather Caygle and Burgess Everett at Politico:
Congress is finally beginning to sketch the outlines of its next big coronavirus response.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi shifted her tone on Friday, calling for a much more focused “Phase 4” relief package to address immediate needs related to the coronavirus pandemic, a departure from the sprawling legislation she and other top Democrats were pushing earlier this week.
The move puts Pelosi more on track to cut a deal with Republicans in the coming weeks, after numerous GOP officials panned her efforts to broaden the next phase of coronavirus legislation.
Both in a television appearance and talking with reporters Friday, Pelosi said it's clear the next tranche of relief funds should be an expansion of the massive $2 trillion package the president signed into law last week — more money to aid states, cities and small businesses, expand unemployment benefits and another round of direct cash payments for Americans.
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Earlier this week, Pelosi and top House Democrats were making a very different pitch — saying now was the time to think big and take a broad brush approach to addressing the economic downturn, pushing ideas like a massive infrastructure package to help jumpstart the economy.
Why the step back from infrastructure? People need help right now, not two or three years from now. Maybe congressional leaders remembered the Obama stimulus. In 2009, there was a great deal of talk about funding "shovel-ready" projects. After the stimulus passed, however, it soon became clear that massive public works projects are complicated, cumbersome, and far more time-consuming than officials had anticipated.
CMC alum Michael Shear at The New York Times:
Even before President Obama entered the White House, he and his allies successfully used the allure of “shovel ready” infrastructure projects to help sell his $787 billion stimulus legislation to a resistant Congress and a wary public.
“I think we can get a lot of work done fast,” Mr. Obama, then the president-elect, said in December 2008, after meeting with governors. “All of them have projects that are shovel ready, that are going to require us to get the money out the door.”
But in a recent interview with Peter Baker for a cover story to be published Sunday in The New York Times Magazine, the president acknowledged what has become painfully obvious in last 20 months: “shovel ready” didn’t mean what he and most people thought it did.
Many of the road, bridge and sewer projects financed by the record-breaking spending bill took more than a year to even start construction as they got bogged down in bureaucratic red tape at the local level. For a country, and a president, eager to see jobs created quickly, the “shovel ready” part of the projects was a disappointment.
In his interview with Mr. Baker, the president said that the benefit of infrastructure spending was that for every dollar spent, “you get a dollar and a half in stimulus because there are ripple effects from building roads or bridges or sewer lines.”
“But the problem is,” he continued, “is that spending it out takes a long time, because there’s really nothing — there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects.”
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