President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better Plan (BBB), once hailed as the most transformational social spending package in modern American history is now nothing more than an ambitious memory.
Remarks about the plan were largely absent from Biden’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday night. Instead, some aspects of the plan, including the extension of the expanded child tax credit, could become their own ambitious agendas.
What Happened to the Build Back Better Plan?
The Build Back Better Plan (BBB) was a $1.7 trillion package that proposed to fund an array of social investments, from lower education and healthcare costs to extending the expanded child tax credit.
The Biden administration hoped to curtail Republican opposition over the bill’s price tag by passing it via a budget reconciliation bill, a special Congressional process that would enable them to pass it with a simple majority vote with Vice President Kamala Harris as the tie-breaker. Going this route would have required all Senate Democrats to be on board—which proved impossible to execute.
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) was one of the most vocal opponents of BBB and one of the main reasons it never made it to the Senate floor. According to Manchin, the bill was too costly and would’ve added too great of a burden to the national debt.
And Democrats are pessimistic about the bill’s hopes. An anonymous survey among senior Capitol Hill aides by PunchBowl News, a political news outlet, found that 84% of senior Democratic aides believed the BBB passed by the House was dead. Most agreed that breaking it up into “chunks” would be the best path forward.
What Happens Next?
Biden, who is facing low approval ratings as inflation continues to ravage the country—which could be exacerbated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine—focused most of his speech on bringing down everyday costs for Americans. He pitched making more products, such as cars and semiconductors, in America to avoid reliance and inflated costs due to foreign supply chains.
And while Biden didn’t mention BBB as a whole during his State of the Union speech, he did mention specific elements of the bill to revitalize discussion around them.
Those elements included extending the expanded child tax credit, implementing universal Pre-K, hiking taxes on corporations and the wealthy and creating more affordable housing and healthcare. He placed these initiatives in the same vein as his plans to lower inflation, arguing that these social investments would cut costs and help alleviate the financial burdens American families are facing.
Biden will need the support of his whole caucus to accomplish these initiatives and already, Manchin has signaled he’s not sure if he’s on board.
“I’ve never found out that you can lower costs by spending more,” Manchin said in remarks reported by The Hill.
