Hi, it's west Kosova. Today we're starting something new here at the Big Take. It's a special report hosted by my brilliant colleague, Salaya Mosen Bloomberg Senior Washington correspondent. Each week, Saliya will bring you original reporting and insights on the most important people, issues, and ideas that will shape the twenty twenty four US election and how they'll impact policy, politics, and power for years to come, not just in the US but around the world. Watch this space for a
new installment every week. Thanks so much for listening, And here's Seleia.
A lot of presidents have tried to go big on infrastructure. It's seen as a surefire way to show American's tangible progress, and President Biden actually managed to pass a massive bill to fix our roads, bridges, airports, and more. You'd think that'd be a pretty clear political win for a president seeking reelection. Not quite. A recent poll of swing state voters that Bloomberg conducted with Morning Consult found that when it comes to infrastructure, more Americans trust former President Trump
than Biden. That's a problem for Biden, but it's also a problem for Mitch landru Landrew is the White House's Infrastructure Coordinator. He's in charge of implementing the bipartisan Infrastructure Law and dispensing its funds.
To one point two trillion dollars. That's a lot of money, but.
Is money enough to accomplish the president's goals. Biden has said that beyond fixing crumbling roads and bridges, he also wants this money to prepare the US for natural disasters and extreme weather events, which in the last year alone cost the US economy one hundred and forty five billion dollars. And Mitch Landrew has experience dealing with catastrophic events. He was lieutenant governor of Louisiana when Hurricane Katrina hit, and later he oversaw the rebuilding of New Orleans as mayor.
Now Biden is asking him to do something similar, but on a national scale. I sat down with Lander to talk about how he's tackling this monumental task, whether the Biden administration is getting credit on the ground, and what's at stake. I'm Senior Washington correspondent Seleiah Mosen. This is the big take from Bloomberg News. Everyone from Louisiana will correct how you pronounce New Orleans, so I kind of knew I was setting myself up for embarrassment.
Well, if you go down to New Orleans, you have to call it New Orleans, not New Orleans.
Bubble cut your break on that.
Landrew comes from a Louisiana political dynasty. His father Moon Landru was mayor of New Orleans in the seventies. His sister Mary was a senator. And it's impossible to talk about Mitchelder's current role senior advisor in the Biden administration without talking about his years in state and local government. In January of two thousand and four, Lander was sworn
in as Louisiana's Lieutenant governor. In August of two thousand and five, Katrina hit I want to update you on the progress of that potentially catastrophic storm, Hurricane Katrina.
New Orleans is a bowl, and as the rain continues to fall, and it has been falling all day, the bowl is filling up.
I think about it every day. I mean, it was a.
It was a cataclysmic event. I mean it's hard to it's hard. I get joked up even thinking about it.
Right now.
New Orleans tonight a city underwater.
The water is continuing to rise, and there may be problems with the levee as well. I was sitting in the Emergency Operation room while I was a Lieutenant governor, and at two o'clock in the morning, I was talking to my friend who was the manager of the Superdome, who I recall very vividly saying to me, Mitch, I've got twenty five thousand people in this building. The roof is peeling off of the building right now, and I don't know if we're going to survive the night.
Thousands maybe did in these floodwaters, and tonight officials at all levels of government are mobilizing to evacuate all one hundred thousand people still here.
Landrew rushed from Baton Rouge back to his hometown of New Orleans. He found it virtually unrecognizable, just.
Seeing everything destroyed in a minute. I mean we kind of we lost everything. We lost houses, we lost schools, we lost clinics and hospitals, we lost everything.
I mean literally all gone seventeen feet underwater.
In the days that followed, Landrew waded through the floodwaters in a boat, helping first responders on rescue missions. His sister, the Senator, gave an interview to CNN at the time, and.
I understand that people are suffering.
I myself have been involved in rescue operations.
My brother has been on a boat.
In New Orleans in the city's lower ninth ward, a mostly black neighborhood, residents were strained on rooftops, those streets were hit the hardest.
Just this complete seat of carnage at desperation. Here a very, very sad scent for these people.
Landrew got a lot of praise for his work across the state, quickly securing federal aid to help rebuild historic buildings. At the end of his first term as Lieutenant governor, he ran for mayor of New Orleans. In office he'd failed to secure twice before, but five years after Hurricane Katrina hit, he won with sixty six percent of the vote.
The city he inherited remained broken, nearly one hundred million dollars in deficit, widespread crime, a stagnant economy, Homelessness had doubled from pre Katrina levels, and those with homes struggled to rebuild.
And not only did we have Katrina, but we had read it, we had gushed off, we had the national recession, we had the BP oils Bill. So just kind of forging through the fires that we had, we had to learn how to rebuild.
Tried to see this as a chance to do a sort of internal audit of the city to figure out what worked and what didn't communities.
When you're in devastation, all you want to do really is close your eyes and pray that it was just a dream and if it wasn't, just to get back like exactly it was before the thing happened. I mean, that's kind of what everybody wants, But you have to ask yourself, well, do we want to put it back just like it was, or do we have a responsibility to make it better? And how do we make it stronger? And how do we prepare for a new future that's coming that maybe we never built right the first time.
Landry got a hold of untapped federal funds and he got to work Other than the city's sewerage and waterboard, which remained mired in mismanagement. His administration's record on infrastructure was largely positive. He rebuilt public spaces, roads, and hospitals, all with potential storm risks in mind.
Trying to find out how to redesign an emergency response was critically important, which made us think about, well, how when we build back, how to build back stronger and better?
If build back better sounds familiar to you, it's because it was the original language Biden used when proposing a lot of his pandemic recovery programs Lander is a company guy in the way that senior advisors to the president kind of have to be. But the task in front of him won't be easy. Let's just consider everything that this law is supposed to address. There are the typical things that you might think of when you hear the
word infrastructure. You know, roads, bridges, public transit lines. Our infrastructure is old. A third of American bridges are in need of repair, so are miles and miles of highways and roads. This year, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the country a C minus on its overall infrastructure. But there's also expanding internet access, dealing with water pollution, cybersecurity, and making the US more climate resilient. The list is
really long. You can see how that money, when spread across so many different types of projects, might not actually go that far. So while Biden's one point two trillion dollar investment is huge, it's a drop in the ocean, and it's kind of embarrassing to boot. China invests more than that in infrastructure every year.
Yeah, no doubt, way behind.
Yeah, what kind of broader commitment do you think we need for America to be able to compete globally?
Well, first of all, more, there's no question about that this is a massive bill.
It's not as much as we need to fix every.
Problem all over America all at one time, but it is a massively good now payment on a future.
Here's another constraint. Biden has a very clear idea of how he wants that money spent. Rather than handing each state a wat of cash, the law lays out rules for how to spend it, like repairing highways is fine, but expanding them not so much. In early twenty twenty two, when Biden first announced plans for implementing the Infrastructure Law, a letter laid it on his desk. It was signed by sixteen Republican governors.
Who said, I disagree that we have to use our money to fix things as opposed to build new highways.
Biden had other requirements too, like prioritizing American made construction materials and funding projects that benefit communities of color. After the break, how Lander is dealing with these tensions and the newest challenges from Congress on infrastructure spending. Welcome back. We've been talking to Senior White House Advisor Mitch Landrew about the trillion dollar infrastructure package he's helping to deploy. Local leaders and the federal government have different ideas for
how to spend the money. I asked Landrew, so how do you juggle when the federal government or what you're looking at is to spend the money one way, and you go on the ground and governors and state and local leaders are saying, actually, we need to do this differently them.
And we talk with them.
I mean, one of the parts of what I call the hard work of governing well requires you to develop good relationships with people and to work out the differences that you have to try to find an accommodation between what you want and what they want. I haven't gotten a governor or a mayor, or a congressman or a senator tell me that they don't want money in that districts to do these things.
The Infrastructure Bill's passage marked a rare moment of unity in a Congress that's royaled by divisions, but in the two years since it's passed, Republicans, even some who voted for the bill, have talked of cutting that spending. That's one way. Some in the GOP propose coping with a funding deadline that's looming on November seventeenth, and if a
compromise isn't reached, the government could shut down. Under their new speaker, Mike Johnson, House Republicans have proposed cuts, including some to transportation grant programs and to the operating budgets of things like Amtrak. On Fox News' Sunday Morning Futures last weekend, Johnson praised his party's quick budgeting work ready.
We're working like a well old machine. We passed one of.
The appropriations bills just a day after I assumed the gabble.
Republicans could be eyeing infrastructure costs, in part because this kind of massive overhaul does not come cheap. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the bipartisan Infrastructure law would add two hundred and fifty six billion dollars to the deficit over roughly the next decade. But Democrats have a counterpoint on cost this investment in updating infrastructure and making it more resilient. It could help save money. In the future,
this country will continue to face costly natural disasters. Think about California with its wildfires or Florida with its coastal storms. Private insurers are starting to pull out of these states, basically saying we don't want the risk of covering areas prone to extreme weather. That do stay are raising premiums, and that brings up another thorny issue. Does the federal government use the same calculus? Is it asking whether it's worth investing in infrastructure in certain places at all? I
asked Landrew about that. What I'm thinking of as Louisiana property insurance rates are really high. A lot of insurers there have gone under. Now that you're in the federal government, when you're looking at an area region, does that factor into how you decide where and how you're going to spend on infrastructure?
No, not really, that's really a matter left to Congress with the National Flood Insurance Program and the risk analysis around all of that stuff. Generally, this money gets down to the ground two ways. Half of it plus a little bit gets sent right to the governors. The other half of the money actually is given out by grants, and that means that governmental entities like airport authorities, cities states,
they can come apply for the money. Now, there are a couple of examples where some of this money is being used to relocate, but that's generally a community's decision to move or to not move.
I just came back from Alaska.
I was at the Nepakiak Village, which is in very north Alaska, and there is a tribal community there that is actually moving from the physical location that they're in now where they're suffering from land loss. But they decided to do that, and they asked for funds to help them do that, as opposed to the government telling them you have to move.
Most vulnerable communities haven't made the choice to leave, including many in Louisiana, and so the government funds are going to improving their infrastructure. Landrew and others on the Biden team are working hard to show voters how far the funds are going.
One of our challenges, one of my responsibilities, is to prove that this really really works, and we're well on our way to do that. I've been one hundred and ten cities or traveled over one twenty thousand miles to date. We have thirty eight thousand projects in some level of formation across the United States of America right now.
I mean, it's quite incredible, but.
So far, it's not clear that the message is coming through to potential voters, at least not those in swing states that Bloomberg and Morning Console polled recently. I asked Landra about that too. We had a poll out of Bloomberg that we did with Morning Console. I don't know if you saw the numbers, but what we found in this poll was it forty two percent of voters say that they trust Trump to handle infrastructure problems in the country,
and thirty eight percent trust Biden. What do you make of that.
Ah, I don't know what to make of it.
I mean, all I can tell you is that when President Trump was in obvious he talked about passing an infrastructure bill and he couldn't and he didn't. So presidents for I'm going to last fifty sixty seventy years have been talking about doing this and could ntavi get it done.
It's hard not to wonder how all of this will factor into the twenty twenty four presidential race.
We didn't pass the bill for election purposes.
I mean, everybody hopes they get credit for what they do, but this is a very, very deep die. One of the other lessons you asked me about New Orleans was that when I was rebuilding the city, the question was to rebuild it fast, and to rebuild it right, and to rebuild it right. Sometimes it takes longer, and it's harder, and you got to dig deeper, and people don't see it right.
Away, but I think people will begin to see it.
Back in two thousand and five, when Landry was in New Orleans boating around to rescue people from rooftops, he took in all the rubble and destruction. He took in the loss of life, the tragedy, but he also witnessed something.
Else, amazingly like ghosts.
You saw people walking out of that water who had lost everything, and they found a way to help somebody else who maybe a day before they would have walked across the street from And I just remember at that time, just it's searing into my brain that there's really nothing we can't.
Do if we do it together.
That's not just the thing you say around the boy Scouy fire. It's a real thing, and that's why I know it's possible.
Thanks for listening to the big take from Bloombird News. I'm your host today, Celeia Mosen. This episode was produced by Julia Press, Naomi Shaven, and Anna Masarakis. It's part of a special series from our DC newsroom. Blake Maples is our mixed engineer. Our story editors are Mike Shephard and Wendy Benjaminson. Sage Bauman is our executive producer. Thanks for tuning in. We'll be back next week.