BackBiden Secured Trillions in Domestic Spending. Now Comes the Hard Part.
President is reorienting government to focus on implementation and making sure money is spent efficiently
PremiumPresident Biden is reorienting swaths of the federal government to focus on implementing the sweeping legislation he signed into law in his first two years in office and directing his senior advisers to guard against the waste and fraud that have bedeviled previous government programs.
Mr. Biden is staking his reputation—and legacy—on spending nearly $2 trillion in taxpayer money efficiently and effectively. Done well, the effort could reshape the economy and help him win a second term. Any mistakes could threaten Mr. Biden’s 2024 re-election odds amid a pledge by congressional Republicans to conduct rigorous oversight of the administration’s spending spree.
The House Oversight and Accountability Committee already has homed in on money flowing through the Energy Department. “The Oversight Committee is concerned about whether the Department can handle the massive amounts of funds it is obligated to disburse in incredibly tight timelines," said Rep. James Comer (R., Ky.), the committee’s chairman.
Though many of the measures in the new laws won’t be fully put in place for years, there are early indications that the massive investments are changing parts of the economy and encouraging new private investment. Companies have announced $435 billion in investments since Mr. Biden took office, the White House said, with much of that coming in the aftermath of the passage of the new bills.
The White House is also grappling with how best to make it clear to voters that Mr. Biden and Democrats in Congress are behind the projects and jobs created by them. A Wall Street Journal-NORC poll conducted last month found that more voters disapprove than approve of Mr. Biden’s efforts to improve the nation’s infrastructure, counter China and address inflation.
To help remedy that, Mr. Biden and his cabinet secretaries have been canvassing the nation talking about the laws, and the president plans to slap his name on signs on infrastructure projects around the country. “It’s important for people to know how it got built, why it got built and when it’s going to get built," said Mitch Landrieu, the former mayor of New Orleans and a senior White House official focused on implementation. “Telling the story is critically important."
The Biden administration is implementing three wide-ranging pieces of legislation—a roughly $1 trillion infrastructure bill; a climate change, tax and healthcare package that includes $430 billion or more in new spending; and a sweeping multibillion-dollar measure to strengthen the domestic semiconductor industry. The White House estimates that the laws will generate $3.5 trillion in public and private investment over a decade.
Together, the laws, which the president signed in 2021 and 2022, call for establishing dozens of new government programs, and require that agencies set up processes to funnel hundreds of billions of dollars to states, companies and consumers.
The amount of money that will flow through the federal government is more than twice as much as the 2009 economic stimulus package, which Mr. Biden implemented as vice president, and represents a larger investment than the Apollo program or the Eisenhower administration’s interstate highway program.
Mr. Biden tapped chief of staff Jeff Zients—an investor and former Obama administration official who helped overhaul HealthCare.gov, the federal website for the Affordable Care Act, when it crashed in 2013—to oversee the implementation effort. Mr. Zients hired a new implementation-focused deputy chief of staff, Natalie Quillian.
“This is the most massive mobilization of government resources in our lifetimes," Ms. Quillian said. Mr. Zients, in an interview, said the president has made implementation his top domestic priority, adding that he briefs Mr. Biden on the issue nearly every day.
In addition, Mr. Biden has assigned four other senior aides to oversee specific parts of the program. Mr. Landrieu, the former New Orleans mayor, is in charge of infrastructure implementation. John Podesta, a veteran of the Clinton and Obama White Houses, is overseeing the rollout of hundreds of billions in federal spending on clean energy projects that were part of the climate change, tax and healthcare package. And Ronnie Chatterji, an economist and former Commerce Department official, is helping to implement the semiconductor law.
They join Gene Sperling, a longtime economic adviser to Mr. Biden, who has for more than two years been in charge of implementing the $1.9 trillion coronavirus response package that the president signed shortly after taking office.
When Mr. Sperling started in his role, Mr. Biden encouraged him to reach out to inspectors general, the government’s independent watchdogs, to get their feedback on how to limit waste and fraud, following a spate of coronavirus-related fraud cases that occurred during the Trump administration. As vice president, Mr. Biden took the same approach, regularly speaking with members of the Recovery Act Accountability and Transparency Board, the panel of inspectors general tasked with oversight of the implementation of the 2009 economic stimulus package.
“Vice President Biden was very supportive of the work of the board," said Glenn Fine, a former Justice Department inspector general who served on the board. “His message was that we’re going to support IGs, we want to empower IGs. If an agency is not cooperating with the IGs, we want to know about it."
Mr. Sperling has helped implement a process in which senior Biden administration officials, agency staff and relevant inspectors general huddle before the launch of new programs to identify potential problems and think through ways to solve them. The meetings are required for all programs stemming from the new laws.
In addition, White House and agency officials meet regularly to discuss implementation challenges that cut across all of the laws, including streamlining permitting to ensure projects can move forward quickly and finding qualified workers to fill the many jobs that will be created by the new programs.
At the same time, federal agencies are hiring hundreds of workers and setting up new offices to streamline the implementation process.
The Commerce Department is managing roughly $100 billion from the semiconductor and infrastructure laws, nearly 10 times the department’s annual budget. The Energy Department, which has traditionally focused on research and development, is creating a new undersecretary of infrastructure and setting up three offices to support the deployment of clean energy projects. The Transportation Department is hiring 1,700 people to help with implementation of the infrastructure law. The department said it has funded more than 23,000 projects so far.
To curb waste, Commerce officials are doling out money to companies in installments, with each payment made only after key milestones have been met. The department is also writing provisions into its contracts allowing for the government to clawback money if projects don’t move forward.
“Any time you invest billions of dollars, tens of billions of dollars in partnership with the public sector, there’s risk. That’s why we are obsessed with accountability, transparency and good process," Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said.
The president is deeply engaged in the process, White House officials said, regularly checking in with his top advisers to receive updates. His frequent refrain in meetings, according to officials: “Hurry the hell up."
“The proof is in the results and the stakes of that are high in substantive terms for the American people," Mr. Podesta said. “The political success will follow."
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