An initiative to launch a massive ‘global infrastructure’ plan is tied up in Congress, NR has learned.
An initiative to launch a massive ‘global infrastructure’ plan is tied up in Congress, NR has learned.
P resident Biden’s signature global-infrastructure push faces a significant new roadblock: opposition from congressional Republicans who refuse to approve a new State Department office to coordinate the multi-billion-dollar investment initiative. A congressional aide told National Review that two powerful Republican lawmakers have moved to block that proposed office from moving forward.
While the White House has already worked to identify projects the initiative could take up, it’s unclear how, or whether, it would proceed without the proposed coordinating office. While it could blow through the holds to establish the office in defiance of Congress, that could raise thorny legal questions and tee up an ugly fight around the global-infrastructure agenda. Neither the National Security Council nor the State Department would comment for this report.
If significant portions of the expansive project — which was launched at last July’s G-7 Summit under the name “Build Back Better World” — are blocked, it would be a blow to Biden’s agenda, especially because it’s viewed within the White House as one of the key accomplishments of his administration.
“We intend for this to be one of the hallmarks of the Biden administration foreign policy over the remainder of his tenure,” said Jake Sullivan, the president’s national-security adviser, at a Washington foreign-policy conference last week. He revealed that Biden would launch “a partnership for global infrastructure, physical health, and digital infrastructure” as an alternative to Chinese investment, and “to the tune of tens, and ultimately, hundreds, of billions of dollars.”
The project is generally understood to be the administration’s answer to China’s multi-trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative, the massive infrastructure project that has boosted Beijing’s influence from Gwadar, Pakistan, to Athens.
But one year following the plan’s unveiling, it’s been left in a sorry state, with senior officials even tiptoeing around the question of the plan’s name, which borrows from the similarly named and highly controversial domestic-spending bill currently stalled in Congress.
Biden mentioned the program during his address to the U.N. in September, stating, “Together with the private sector and our G-7 partners, we aim to mobilize hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure investment.”
Last April, Biden was still speaking about Build Back Better World, which he told an audience in North Carolina would ensure that countries across Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East have the capacity to “make it better for themselves.”
Later that month, however, there was reportedly a shift in the White House, as reality set in that Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema had successfully killed the domestic Build Back Better Act.
At that point, the White House instructed officials to call the project “the values-driven, high-standard, transparent, and catalytic infrastructure initiative announced by President Biden at the Carbis Bay G-7 Summit last year,” according to the American Prospect, so as to not weigh down the international project with Biden’s domestic-policy baggage.
That awkward rebranding has taken root, with the National Security Council’s communications coordinator, John Kirby, and an anonymous senior official this week touting the president’s plans to launch the initiative at the G-7 summit but conspicuously dancing around the Build Back Better aspect during various press briefings.
In the background, meanwhile, work on the project had continued through the National Security Council, which vetted various investment projects that G-7 countries could undertake throughout fall 2021. The deputy national-security adviser at the time, Daleep Singh, visited locations across West Africa and Latin America, with a senior administration official telling Voice of America last year that Singh’s team had identified some 50 projects spanning climate infrastructure.
The official also told VOA that standards are paramount, “so transparency, collaboration with the host countries, inclusivity, so that the benefits are spread across all segments, and also sustainability, with no strings attached.”
After the State Department transmitted its intent to establish an office to coordinate the initiative’s work last month, Representative Michael McCaul and Senator Jim Risch, the top GOP members on the House Foreign Affairs and Senate Foreign Relations Committees, placed holds that block it until their questions are satisfactorily answered.
Republican concern about the office centers on the vague nature of the proposed initiative’s work, the fact that administration officials are downplaying its role in countering China, and the program’s obsessive focus instead on fashionable progressive causes, such as climate and gender equity.
The department has also said in some meetings that its decision not to speak to the program’s counter-China branding is deliberate and that mentioning it would be too obvious.
In fact, State’s notification to lawmakers that it intended to create the office doesn’t mention China once, while it identifies other challenges.
“Reduced fiscal space for governments around the world increases the need for nonprofit, private-sector and development finance support to meet the central challenges of the 21st century — namely combating the climate crisis, promoting energy security, safeguarding global health and health security and ending the coronavirus pandemic, accelerating technological transformation in the face of the growing digital divide, and advancing gender equity and equality, including the empowerment of women and girls,” states the document, a copy of which was obtained by NR.
The proposed office would consist of seven staffers, working to coordinate the Partnership for Global Infrastructure (PGI) with other government and private-sector participants. The office would also be tasked with ensuring that projects meet environmental, labor, and gender-equity standards.
All the while, the aide said that the State Department has not clarified what it means by “infrastructure,” which could be understood to encompass everything from digital projects to work on gender and the environment. The initiative’s first projects, announced in the spring, have focused on digital connectivity, while the administration is also proposing a $50 million investment in “global childcare infrastructure,” subject to congressional approval. It’s also unclear what would make this new PGI different from existing U.S. agencies, such as the International Development Finance Corporation.
McCaul and Risch can technically maintain their holds while they have questions about the proposed office, and although State has provided some answers, there’s no indication that the two have yet received responses adequate to convince them to relinquish their holds.