Highway updates, affordable housing and school repairs: Biden to unveil ambitious $2 trillion infrastructure plan
CBSN
President Biden is set to unveil one of the most ambitious federal spending proposals in American history on Wednesday, a more than $2 trillion plan that would reshape the American economy by renovating some of the nation's most iconic landmarks, rebuilding aging schools and spending billions of dollars to fight climate change.
At least $621 billion would be spent to rebuild more than 20,000 miles of highways and roads and repair more than 10,000 bridges. Major airports would undergo significant facelifts and roughly 500,000 new electric vehicle-charging stations would dot the national landscape by 2030. More than $200 billion would be spent to update or build two million affordable housing units. Clean, lead-free drinking water would flow into thousands of schools for the first time at a cost of $111 billion. And $18 billion would be spent to update veterans' hospitals, some of which haven't been significantly updated in more than 50 years. "The American Jobs Plan will invest in America in a way we have not invested since we built the interstate highways and won the Space Race," the White House said in a statement previewing the legislation. Comparing the proposal to lofty federal spending programs from the 1950s and 1960s, the administration added that the new Biden plan "will unify and mobilize the country to meet the great challenges of our time: the climate crisis and the ambitions of an autocratic China."
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