Billions in Biden’s first rescue package have yet to reach people.
For all the attention devoted to President Biden’s ambitious domestic agenda — the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) that passed back in March 2021, the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure act passed in November, and the currently stalled Build Back Better Act, which is hovering at about $1.8 trillion for social programs and needs — here’s a crazy fact: many states and localities are only now figuring out how they are going to spend the “rescue” money passed almost a year ago. It’s no wonder Biden’s approval numbers have dipped; they aren’t seeing how his signature initiatives may affect them because many of those programs haven’t even gotten into gear.
A simple Google search on “American Rescue Plan” shows this plainly. The city council of Superior, Wisconsin, is just now getting its first look at how its mayor wants to spend the $17 million allocated to them ten months ago under ARPA. Cabell County, West Virginia got about $42 million of the billions apportioned to help schools recover from the pandemic, which it is just starting to spend now on things like hiring more nurses, putting WiFi in school buses, and the like. It was only yesterday that the city council of Couer D’Alene, Idaho actually voted to accept the $8.6 million it was allocated under ARPA. (Most of the 75 people who attended that council meeting wanted to reject the money, out of misguided fears that accepting it would lead to socialism and tyranny — I guess they want to live in their own private idaho.) The residents of Maine’s Aroostook County are just now being invited to public hearings to discuss how to use the $13 million they were awarded. The same is true for the residents of Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, who have $46.7 million to spend.
Some of these delays can be attributed to the vagaries of local government processes, and ARPA left a lot of flexibility to allow states and localities to determine what they wanted to prioritize. But many local and state governments are also severely understaffed due to years of budget cuts forced on them by fiscal conservatives, a problem that has only been compounded by the stresses brought on by the pandemic. Considering how much Democratic politicians want to take credit for these huge appropriations, one would think that they’d being doing a lot more to shore up the capacities of state and local service providers. But some seem content to put out press releases bragging about federal funds flowing to their communities without doing the continuous legwork to see to it that the monies actually get spent, and well spent, in a timely way.
At worst, this means a lot of the money flowing into local coffers is going to end up lining the wrong pockets. Joel Rogers, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who focused on policy innovation at the state level, told me, “After a half-century of systematic divestment from state and local government operational and planning capacity, outright opposition to Biden’s goals from the majority of governors and state legislatures, and unprecedented tightening of constraints on local government by those same characters, it should surprise that there’s a yawning implementation gap in spending this money wisely.” He warns, “This is a field day for predatory consultants, cynically equity-washing and green-washing and efficiency-washing their greed. No surprise there, either. They’re not in the business of building democratic civic power, but ever more complete corporate domination of public life.”
Many Americans also have little idea how much they use and benefit from government programs on a daily basis. If you ask people if they have ever used a government social program, most will say no. But then, if you ask them specifically if they’ve ever gotten things like Social Security, unemployment insurance, the home mortgage interest deduction or a student loan, more than nine out of ten will say yes. Millions of poor families have benefited from the emergency increase to the child care tax credit included in ARPA, but they may not even know that it was a Biden priority, because the checks came from the IRS (and they’ve now expired with little public fanfare).
In some cases, the problem truly is back in Washington, DC. For example, while the Biden Administration has made substantial commitments to improve broadband access in rural areas, only about half of all the eligible tribal communities even applied for grants under the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program, a multibillion-dollar program aimed at increasing digital equity in tribal communities. As Cronkite News’ Camila Pedrose wrily put it in her recent story on this logjam, “Many tribes did not have the broadband access needed to apply for the funding that would let them improve broadband access.” The first round of grants were only publicized online, and while paper applications were accepted, many tribal councils had difficulties meeting and planning their proposals in the midst of the pandemic. Worse yet, NTIA has only approved five of the 280 applications that it did receive.
I’m not arguing that the federal government can’t do anything right, though the old saying about software projects carries a hard kernel of truth. That is, “You can have it fast, cheap or good: pick two.” Today, there is a growing movement across the government devoted to improving government service delivery, born out of the 2011 failure of the Obama administration’s signature HealthCare.gov website. You can see the fruit of that work in the quiet success of two new sites focused on helping Americans get free Covid tests delivered to them: CovidTests.gov and the US Postal Services new hub for getting tests. Both have gotten nearly a million visits a day since their launch earlier this week and so far users have been pleasantly surprised by how smoothly they work.
But as the Biden Administration struggles through its lowest point in public opinion since the president’s inauguration a year ago, it’s worth remembering that Democrats, with all their commitments to using government as a pro-active force for improving people’s lives, have a harder job than today’s Republican Party, which seems committed only to using government to fund the military, shovel tax benefits to the rich and big corporations, and police women’s bodies. Not only do people who believe in the power of government to do good have to swim against a tide of disinformation, cynicism and obstructionism, they have to make sure the trillions they’re appropriating actually get spent in a timely enough way for the public to see their tax dollars at work. As that money starts to really flow, it will be interesting to see if Democrats get the credit they deserve for pushing these programs forward.