The president of the United States, Joe Biden, said Thursday that an agreement was reached on an infrastructure spending plan after leaving a meeting with Democratic and Republican senators.
“We have reached an agreement. A group of senators, five Democrats and five Republicans, came together and forged an infrastructure agreement that will create millions of American jobs,” Biden said on Twitter.
The agreement, for which no financial details have been disclosed but is expected to be around $ 1 trillion, comes after months of negotiations between Republicans and Democrats, and will need to be ratified in Congress.
According to the US media, this plan includes more than 550,000 million dollars of new expenses in addition to the reallocation of other funds, for a total amount of about 950,000 million.
In previous negotiations, the president had lowered the amount of the plan, which he initially placed at 2.3 billion dollars, after criticism from Republicans for considering it excessive.
Biden indicated that the plan will allow “the creation of millions of jobs” in the reconstruction of ports, airports, bridges and highways.
Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema, one of the promoters of the proposal, stressed to journalists that all parties had to “give in to something to achieve something.”
Democrats have a slim majority in the Senate, so they need at least ten Republican senators to move the legislation through, something that seems feasible given the broad support expressed Thursday.
Although this represents a great step forward, this agreement does not mark the end of the discussions. Two Democratic majority leaders in Congress said Thursday that the plan must go hand in hand with the development of another major bill that would include other priorities of the Joe Biden administration.
Biden had proposed at the end of March to invest about 2 trillion dollars in infrastructure over eight years, in order to create “millions of jobs” in the United States, in order to remain number one in the world economy ahead of China. , but also to fight against climate change.
Therefore, after months of discussions, the negotiations are progressing on two parallel tracks. On the one hand, this “traditional” infrastructure plan, bridges, highways, airports, and on the other hand will go Biden’s priorities that Democrats have called “family” or “human” infrastructure.
With information from AFP, EFE and Reuters
