What’s in Biden's American Jobs Plan?

The Biden Administration has released the American Jobs Plan, a package that looks to overhaul the country’s infrastructure. 

The plan contains proposals for specifics ranging from surface transportation, the power grid, clean energy investments, manufacturing and affordable housing.

Most of the plan will require congressional action and as a result it does not provide detail for every specific issue area. There is also currently no legislation in Congress, but that is expected in the coming weeks and months. 

Below are some excerpts from Biden’s plan as broken down by the National Lumber and Building Material Dealers Association (NLBMDA):

• Fix highways, rebuild bridges, upgrade ports, airports and transit systems. The President’s plan calls for modernizing 20,000 miles of highways, roads, and main-streets. It will fix the ten most economically significant bridges in the country in need of reconstruction. It also will repair the worst 10,000 smaller bridges, providing critical linkages to communities. And, it will replace thousands of buses and rail cars, repair hundreds of stations, renew airports, and expand transit and rail into new communities.
• Produce, preserve, and retrofit more than a million affordable, resilient, accessible, energy efficient, and electrified housing units. Through targeted tax credits, formula funding, grants, and project-based rental assistance, President Biden’s plan will extend affordable housing rental opportunities to underserved communities nationwide, including rural and tribal areas.
• Build and rehabilitate more than 500,000 homes for low- and middle-income homebuyers. President Biden is calling on Congress to take immediate steps to spur the construction and rehabilitation of homes for underserved communities. Specifically, he is calling on Congress to pass the Neighborhood Homes Investment Act (NHIA). Offering $20 billion worth of NHIA tax credits over the next five years will, according to the Administration, result in approximately 500,000 homes built or rehabilitated.
• Eliminate exclusionary zoning and harmful land use policies. President Biden is calling on Congress to enact a new competitive grant program that awards flexible and attractive funding to jurisdictions that take concrete steps to eliminate “exclusionary zoning laws” to produce affordable housing.
• Address longstanding public housing capital needs. President Biden is calling on Congress to invest $40 billion to improve the infrastructure of the public housing system in America. This funding will address critical life-safety concerns, mitigate imminent hazards to residents, and undertake energy efficiency measures which will significantly reduce ongoing operating expenses.
• Put union building trade workers to work upgrading homes and businesses to save families money. President Biden’s plan will upgrade homes through block grant programs, the Weatherization Assistance Program, and by extending and expanding home and commercial efficiency tax credits. President Biden’s plan also will establish a $27 billion Clean Energy and Sustainability Accelerator to mobilize private investment into distributed energy resources; retrofits of residential, commercial and municipal buildings; and clean transportation.