Infrastructure push sets off feeding frenzy in Washington

Source: Politico | March 31, 2021 | Megan Cassella and Theodoric Meyer

The White House’s rollout of the biggest infrastructure package in at least five decades has sparked a lobbying frenzy in Washington.

President Joe Biden has laid down his opening bid on infrastructure: a sprawling and ambitious $2 trillion plan designed to rebuild the country’s roads and bridges, expand access to clean water and broadband and create what he says will be millions of jobs.

Now everybody wants a piece of it.

The White House’s rollout of the biggest infrastructure package in at least five decades has sparked a lobbying frenzy in Washington, a mad dash among lawmakers and lobbyists to weigh in on the legislation and sway the Biden administration to include their pet projects or exclude the corporate tax hikes they don’t want to pay. The early jockeying for influence over the plan portends a fierce debate about the details that could last much of the year, if not longer.

Veteran lobbyists said the package could spark the most intensive lobbying effort in history, dwarfing the efforts to shape President Barack Obama’s stimulus bill in 2009, President Donald Trump’s tax overhaul in 2017 and even the massive relief bills passed during the pandemic.

“It will make the American Rescue Plan basically pale in comparison,” said Arshi Siddiqui, a former aide to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who’s now a lobbyist at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, referring to the Covid-19 relief package Biden signed only in March.

The proposal has already spurred a lobbying bonanza.

So many would-be clients have reached out to the law and lobbying firm Holland & Knight that it’s had to turn some of them away, said Rich Gold, the leader of the firm’s public policy and regulation group. The scope of Biden’s proposal is broad enough that there are few industries that won’t try to weigh in on it.

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