The White House push to solidify President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda picked up its pace this week, with more lawmaker meetings on the schedule, the vice president making a pitch out West and the president himself continuing his travel to pitch the plan directly to the American people.
President Biden will host two different groups of Democrats for talks on Tuesday, the White House announced — progressives and moderates — after meeting with the leader of the progressive caucus, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., earlier Monday.
“We’re encouraged by the accelerated pace of talks and are eager to get this done,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday.
“The president is certainly feeling an urgency to move things forward, to get things done,” Psaki later added. “We are eager to move forward with a unified path to deliver for the American people,” though she did not set a deadline for a final ‘Build Back Better’ proposal, which the administration now acknowledges will not weigh in at $3.5 trillion as first outlined.
The White House also announced Monday that President Biden will once again travel to pitch elements of his plan in a trip to Scranton, Pa., on Wednesday, as he did in Connecticut last week in a visit focused on child care.
While the individual pieces of the president’s agenda are popular among Americans when they’re polled, like universal pre-school, there is still a disconnect between those pieces belonging to the president’s plan.
“We recognize people like what's in there. They don't know what's in there, and he's going to be out there doing more of it,” Psaki said.
But some pieces of Biden’s agenda could be on the ropes, too. Axios reported on Sunday, for example, that Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., has called for the child tax credit expansion to include an income cap and work requirement for families, potentially putting a damper on a core piece of the president’s agenda.
Vice President Kamala Harris, meanwhile, took an outdoor tour of Lake Mead in Nevada on Monday, where water hit its lowest level in history this year — down more than 150 feet in the last two decades — as the effects of climate change and drought accumulate.
Both the money in the bipartisan infrastructure bill on hold in Congress and funding for climate resilience in the larger spending plan is meant to boost places like Lake Mead, which provides water to 25 million people in Nevada, Arizona, California and Mexico.
“This is about thinking ahead. Recognizing where we are and where we're headed if we don't address these issues with a sense of urgency,” Harris said after her tour Monday.
President Biden will travel to Europe for the U.N. Climate Change Conference at the end of October, leaving limited time for in-person negotiations on his agenda this month before he meets with world leaders.