Among the laundry list of spending items inside the Biden infrastructure plan are proposals that are really about making government bigger. 

FEE’s Brad Polumbo looked at some of the line items in the Biden plan, which includes:

…$10 billion to create a “Civilian Climate Corp.” The White House claims that “This $10 billion investment will put a new, diverse generation of Americans to work conserving our public lands and waters, bolstering community resilience, and advancing environmental justice through a new Civilian Climate Corps.”

And a push for government internet service:

Loosely lumped under the broad term “digital infrastructure,” the plan allocates $100 billion to “bring affordable, reliable, high-speed broadband to every American.” Interestingly, the proposal openly states that it wishes to promote government and NGO control of broadband and push out private sector providers: It “prioritizes support for broadband networks owned, operated by, or affiliated with local governments, non-profits, and co-operatives—providers with less pressure to turn profits.”

A very, very generous definition of infrastructure could include the last item, were private industry not already spending billions to make it happen. But as Polumbo notes, we’ve seen this same Biden approach before:

…remember that only 10 percent of the Biden administration’s $1.9 trillion in “COVID relief” spending was actually directly related to COVID-19, with much of it going to waste, politician pet projects, and partisan priorities. The president appears to have taken a similar approach to infrastructure spending. 

It worked then, he’s counting on it to work now.

Image Credit: By Jericho [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons