WASHINGTON: US President Joe Biden on Thursday embraced a $1.2 trillion bipartisan Senate deal to renew the nation’s roads, bridges and highways and help stimulate the economy — a major breakthrough on one of his key domestic policy goals.

“We have a deal,” Biden told reporters, flanked by Democratic and Republican senators who wrote the infrastructure proposal that followed months of White House negotiations with lawmakers.

Its $579 billion in new spending includes major investments in the nation’s power grid, broadband internet services and passenger and freight rail.

But it does not contain other key priorities for Biden and progressive Democrats, such as new spending on home health care and child care, which Biden pitched as “human infrastructure.”

The Democrats who control Congress by razor-thin margins aim to cover those areas in another spending package that they want to maneuver through the Senate without Republican votes.

“This deal means millions of good-paying jobs and fewer burdens felt at the kitchen table ... But it also signals to ourselves, and to the world, that American democracy can deliver, and because of that it represents an important step forward for our country,” Biden said later at the White House.

Published in Dawn, June 25th, 2021