Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she hoped to pass an infrastructure bill and have a deal in hand on the social policy bill by the end of the week.
President Biden huddled with key Democrats on Sunday to iron out crucial spending and tax provisions as they raced to wrap up their expansive social safety net legislation before his appearance at a U.N. climate summit next week. Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said Democrats were close to completing the bill, displaying confidence that the negotiations over issues like paid leave, tax increases and Medicare benefits that have bedeviled the party for months would soon end. “We have 90 percent of the bill agreed to and written. We just have some of the last decisions to be made,” Ms. Pelosi said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” adding that she hoped to pass an infrastructure bill that had already cleared the Senate and have a deal in hand on the social policy bill by the end of the week. “We’re pretty much there now.” Her comments came as Mr. Biden met with Senators Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, and Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, one of the critical centrist holdouts on the budget bill. The White House called the breakfast at Mr. Biden’s Wilmington home a “productive discussion.” For weeks, intraparty divisions over the scope and size of their marquee domestic policy plan have delayed an agreement on how to trim the initial $3.5 trillion blueprint Democrats passed this year. In order to bypass united Republican opposition and pass the final bill, Democrats are using an arcane budget process known as reconciliation, which shields fiscal legislation from a filibuster but would require every Senate Democrat to unite behind the plan in the evenly divided chamber. The party’s margins in the House are not much more forgiving. Facing opposition over the $3.5 trillion price tag, White House and party leaders are coalescing around a cost of up to $2 trillion over 10 years. They have spent days negotiating primarily with Mr. Manchin and Senator Kyrsten Sinema, Democrat of Arizona and another centrist holdout. House Democratic leaders hope to advance both a compromise reconciliation package and the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package.
