Senate GOP Issues Counteroffer to Biden Infrastructure Plan

The GOP outline has significantly less spending than Biden's proposed plan.


The GOP outline has significantly less spending than Biden’s proposed plan.

US President Joe Biden has been going back and forth recently with Senate GOP members on his proposed infrastructure plan. Biden’s most recent iteration of the plan will cost $1.7 trillion, and would focus on bolstering both infrastructure and the middle class. Today, the Senate GOP issued a counteroffer to Biden’s plan for a significantly lower $928 billion.

“We’re going to keep talking, and I understand the president is willing to keep talking. … We’d like to get an outcome on a significant infrastructure package,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnel told CNBC.

While the White House has yet to respond to the offer, Senate Democrats have fired back, with Senator Elizabeth Warren in particular saying that the GOP’s proposal wasn’t “a serious counteroffer.”

“First of all, they don’t have pay-fors for this, it’s not real,” Warren told MSNBC. “They have this illusory notion of how we’re going to take money that’s already been committed to other places and other spending.”

The GOP proposal is missing several key parts of Biden’s proposal, including home health care, electric vehicle rebates, and improvements to schools and housing. Biden has also called for increased taxes on the wealthiest American citizens, though he has promised not to raise taxes on anyone making more than $400,000 annually. The GOP has taken a hard stance on this, refusing to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy.

“We can do this without touching … those tax cuts,” Senator Shelley Moore Capito told CNBC.