Why Didn’t the GOP Prevent Biden from Directing Billions of Dollars in Infrastructure Money to His Union Friends?

Today, President Biden will sign an executive order “mandating that the government enter into agreements with labor unions setting pay and conditions for federal construction projects that cost more than $35 million.” The order, the Wall Street Journal reports, “will cover $262 billion in federal government construction contracts and affect nearly 200,000 workers,” and comes as “the federal government is about to embark on billions of dollars in construction projects following the enactment last November of a roughly $1 trillion infrastructure bill.”

It also undercuts Joe Manchin, who has argued in public that the bill contains no special handouts for unions. On November 12 last year, Manchin spoke to Hoppy Kercheval, a West Virginia radio host, and waxed lyrical about the deal he’d helped strike. Among the benefits Manchin listed were that the law’s prevailing wage provisions would yield the “best paying jobs with benefits that we have in our state.” “Does that mean,” Kercheval asked, “that all these will be . . . that these have to be union workers? Is that true?” “No.” Manchin replied. “No.” “You have to pay prevailing wage,” Kercheval asked again. “But it doesn’t have to be a union — there’s no requirement?” “No,” Manchin assured him. “Whoever! I want West Virginians to get the jobs, and I know there’ll be an awful lot of union companies that’ll be able to do this, and there’s gonna be a lot of opportunities for non-union companies.”

Per Reuters, Biden’s executive order does not apply to “projects funded by grants to non-federal agencies.” But it does apply to “billions of other federal spending on waterways, military bases and other areas” — including in West Virginia. In November, Manchin could say, “No, no!” with a straight face. Today, he would have to say, “It depends.”

Manchin aside, one has to wonder why the 19 Republicans in the Senate who voted for the bill did not demand a line that prohibited the president from applying such a rule to its disbursements. It is, of course, disgraceful that Congress has outsourced enough power to the executive branch that our presidents are able to make such determinations on their own. But, if it had wished to, Congress could easily have removed that power from this particular bill and prevented President Biden from allocating public money to his political allies. Reporting on the move, Bloomberg bluntly confirmed that “it remains to be seen whether” the way in which Biden is spending the infrastructure funds “will be enough to mobilize unions to turn out for Democrats in November.”

Republicans really couldn’t have seen this coming?