Biden calls for U.S. infrastructure revamp in meeting with lawmakers

President Joe Biden promised U.S. senators from both major parties on Thursday to work together to modernize an aging U.S. infrastructure after his predecessor Donald Trump failed to tackle the matter. Biden plans to ask Congress this month to invest heavily in infrastructure amid studies showing close to half of U.S. roads are in poor or mediocre condition and more than a third of U.S. bridges need repair, replacement or significant rehabilitation.

"We're going to see what we can put together," Biden said at an hour-long White House meeting that included Vice President Kamala Harris and key senators. "There's a lot we have to do.... We just have to step up." Attendees included: Democrat Tom Carper, the Environment and Public Works Committee chairman; Shelley Moore Capito, the panel's top Republican; Ben Cardin and Jim Inhofe, the top Democrat and Republican on the committee's transportation and infrastructure subcommittee.

The White House said Biden shared the administration's vision "for building sustainable infrastructure that will withstand the impacts of climate change and fuel an American clean energy revolution." Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who took part virtually, told Reuters last week the U.S. government must rebuild the transportation sector for post-pandemic times.

While infrastructure investment is viewed as a bipartisan issue, Trump and congressional leaders during his four-year term failed to agree on a major bill to repair and replace aging and dangerous bridges, airports, water pipes and other projects. Trump in 2018 unveiled an infrastructure plan that proposed spending $200 billion over 10 years to spur $1.5 trillion in largely private sector infrastructure spending but Congress never voted on it. Last year, Trump's White House drafted a $1 trillion infrastructure spending plan but the administration never publicly released it.

Funding has been a point of contention in recent years after Congress abandoned a decades-old policy of using fuel tax revenue to largely pay for infrastructure repairs. In 2019, Trump and Democratic congressional leaders agreed to spend $2 trillion over a decade, but he never proposed a new revenue source to pay for the upgrades and never made it a priority. Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is in charge of the U.S. aviation system, highways, vehicles, pipelines and transit.