Five cabinet members, all former mayors or governors and therefore experts in infrastructure fights, are fanning out across America and Capitol Hill to try to sell the president’s rebuilding plan.
As mayor of South Bend, Ind., Pete Buttigieg grew to view asphalt as his enemy. As governor of Michigan, Jennifer M. Granholm faced a Republican-led legislature intent on blocking her biggest infrastructure ambitions. As governor of Rhode Island, Gina Raimondo overcame early opposition to an infrastructure plan from moderate members of her own party. All three are part of a group of five cabinet secretaries President Biden has selected to serve as the administration’s salespeople for the American Jobs Plan, which seeks to pour trillions of dollars into infrastructure and other new government programs. “Every square foot of asphalt, from a mayor’s perspective, is a square foot you have to pay forever to maintain, to resurface, to fill potholes on it,” Mr. Buttigieg, now the transportation secretary, said in a recent interview. “There were roads that maybe saw one car every few minutes that were paved wide enough for four cars side by side. There’s a cost to maintaining that.” The lessons in asphalt Mr. Buttigieg learned in Indiana informed how he is trying to sell Mr. Biden’s infrastructure plan across the country today. “The point is we design for the future and ask what we want to build, instead of redoing everything we’ve done in the past,” he said. In terms of making the case for the ambitious plan, he said, “there’s nothing like being able to say, ‘Here’s how we faced it in my community.’” Along with Mr. Buttigieg and Ms. Granholm, the energy secretary, and Ms. Raimondo, the commerce secretary, the group includes Marcia L. Fudge, the housing and urban development secretary, and Martin J. Walsh, the labor secretary. Their job is to push the infrastructure plan on Capitol Hill and across the country with voters. They were picked because they lead agencies that oversee the bulk of the proposals in the jobs plan, which covers broadband, public housing, climate change and job training, in addition to roads and bridges. But they are also former mayors or governors who have tackled the challenges at the local level that Mr. Biden now faces nationwide. In fact, they all tried — and sometimes failed — to sell their own infrastructure plans, either to a recalcitrant legislature or to resistant members of their own party. As governor of Michigan, Ms. Granholm brought together business and labor leaders to try to pass a $1 billion investment in the state’s infrastructure, but failed in the face of a Republican-led legislature. Mr. Buttigieg learned the hard way that a Smart Streets program would take months of community outreach to Black business owners if he did not want to be accused of aiding gentrification. In Rhode Island, Ms. Raimondo oversaw a state ranked by CNBC as having the worst infrastructure in the United States in 2019, and had to negotiate with moderate Democrats on a plan that had big-rig trucks pay tolls to repair crumbling bridges.
