WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. President Joe Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure plan contains investment that will foster job growth in the short- and long-term, including child care funding so more Americans get back to work, his top economic adviser said Sunday.
Biden’s blueprint to revitalize America’s infrastructure is designed to create more jobs and keep the economy going as the United States emerges from the coronavirus pandemic, Brian Deese, director of the National Economic Council, said in an interview with “Fox News Sunday.”
“But let’s also think for the longer term, about where those investments that we can make that will really drive, not just more job growth but better job growth, not just job growth in the short term but job growth for long term, by investing in our infrastructure, by investing in our research and development, in a way that we haven’t since the 1960s,” he said.
Deese joined several Biden administration officials on television news shows on Sunday to promote the plan, which has drawn strong opposition from Republicans as too expensive and too liberal.
Republican Senator Roy Blunt urged the administration to scale the plan way back, to focus on basics.
“If we’d go back and look at roads and bridges and ports and airports, and maybe even underground water systems and broadband, you’d still be talking about less than 30% of this entire package,” Blunt said on the Fox program.
Blunt said he believed that a less ambitious goal, of around $615 billion, would be more palatable to some of his Republican colleagues and get Biden the bipartisan deal he has said he wanted.
Reporting by Doina Chiacu;Editing by Bill Berkrot