Hill Heat

While President Biden gave his blessing for a bipartisan infrastructure framework yesterday, Sen. Joe Manchin was already pushing the committee he chairs to get a jump-start on its portion of the spending.

Manchin, chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has long pressed for a bipartisan infrastructure package. Indeed, the West Virginia Democrat is widely seen as the key reason negotiations on a deal have persisted.

Now all Manchin needs to do is get everyone on board with his $95 billion draft proposal.

“This bill will go into our infrastructure package,” Manchin told E&E News yesterday in the midst of a hearing on his proposal, which emerged late last week as the negotiations on a bipartisan deal began ramping up.

The timing of yesterday’s hearing — just hours before Biden backed the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure framework agreed to by White House negotiators and a group of senators that included Manchin — was no accident.

Former Energy and Natural Resources Chairwoman Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who was one of the 10 senators who spent hours this week negotiating the agreement with top Biden administration officials, said yesterday that her successor atop the panel used the weeks of meetings to inform his draft bill.

“We have the contours of the energy infrastructure in our framework,” Murkowski said in an interview after returning from a meeting with Biden on the plan.

“What Manchin has done — and keep in mind, this has come together very, very quickly — is to try to write a bill utilizing the framework that has been under discussion now for these past few weeks.”

However, while the framework released by the White House contains a $73 billion line item for “power infrastructure including grid authority,” it leaves the details to Congress.

“We got to write the bill,” Murkowski noted.

Manchin conceded the point yesterday. “Everything that you are seeing in that framework the president put out, that has to be all worked in every committee of jurisdiction,” he said. “So we started ours because we knew where we were at and how much we had to work with.”

Yesterday’s hearing, which will be followed by a markup after the July 4 recess, “gives us a little bit of a jump on everybody,” he said. “That’s why we wanted to do the hearing now.”

Manchin’s draft legislation would infuse $95 billion into efforts like fortifying fragile electric grids, bolstering supply chains for critical minerals and ramping up energy efficiency efforts.

The proposal also includes the creation of a $1.2 billion annual credit program that would give the executive branch the power to help financially struggling nuclear power plants stay online. It would also fully fund clean energy demonstration projects approved by the Energy Act of 2020.

“With the right strategy, reinvesting in our nation’s infrastructure can also strengthen the economy, create jobs, boost our competitiveness and help tackle climate change,” Manchin said yesterday during the hearing on energy infrastructure.

But he still faces a challenge in selling the plan to his Senate colleagues. Murkowski, who led the panel in the last Congress with Manchin at her side as ranking member, isn’t entirely sold on it, although she conceded that she’s been so busy this week on infrastructure talks that she’s still absorbing the substance of the bill.

“Let’s just say it’s not perfect, but we don’t even know how we’re going to work out some of the details here,” Murkowski said.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), who has encouraged the bipartisan negotiations, said yesterday that he was encouraged that there was a deal on individual line-item spending, but noted, “We still need a lot more details on that.”

He had not seen Manchin’s plan, but said bipartisan support for the $73 billion for energy infrastructure bodes well for agreement on the finer details.

“Anything that this group of Democrats and a group of Republicans agree to is likely to be acceptable,” he said in an interview. “It’s likely to leave a lot of things undone, but it’s likely to be acceptable.”

Manchin kicks off energy debate Manchin made his case for the bill during yesterday’s hearing, which featured witnesses from the Biden administration across the Energy and Interior departments.

Those officials and some Democratic senators largely endorsed the draft language put forward by Manchin, although backers pressed the committee to go even further in its spending to better match the proposals pitched by the White House in the American Jobs Plan.

Kathleen Hogan, acting undersecretary for science and energy at DOE, largely heralded the Manchin proposal, backing the grid authority language, clean energy demonstration project funding and billions in energy efficiency spending.

“That said, additional capabilities, flexibilities and funding as outlined in the American Jobs Plan are needed,” Hogan cautioned, including the need for a clean energy standard along the lines pitched by the Biden administration to move the electric sector to 100% clean energy by 2035.

The call for a clean energy standard was echoed by Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.).

“I think we need to look hard at a clean energy standard to meet the scale of time that is necessary in this transition,” Heinrich said.

Progressives have demanded that any infrastructure package include significant provisions dedicated to tackling the climate crisis.

While many Democratic lawmakers applauded Manchin’s proposal, they insisted that more money needs to be in the final package.

“We are going to need, in my view, increased funding above what is in this proposal, but I think we all know we have to work on these issues in the way this committee has always focused, which is to do it in a bipartisan way,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).

Republican opposition While the proposal largely earned high marks from Biden administration officials, Republicans were more skeptical about the committee process so far for the crafting of the bill, as well as the high price tag associated with some of the programs in Manchin’s draft proposal.

Energy and Natural Resources ranking member John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) specifically griped that Republicans were not consulted in the drafting of the bill, although he did express support for programs that would help keep online the existing nuclear fleet and advance carbon capture technology.

“The lack of consultation means we are not including the priorities from all of our committee members, who represent states with different needs,” Barrasso said. “There is time to right the ship, to build this consensus, and to pass something we all can support.”

Barrasso also complained that the bill would extend past the authorization responsibilities of the committee to include direct appropriations, a prospect with “no precedent where this committee appropriated anything close to the $100 billion included in this draft bill.”

Those criticisms specifically targeted provisions in the bill that would promote energy efficiency, including money to bolster building code improvements, $500 million set aside for efficiency improvements at schools and $3.5 billion for DOE’s Weatherization Assistance Program.

In addition to price tag complaints, Republicans lamented the lack of language to induce permitting reforms for energy infrastructure like transmission lines or natural gas pipelines.

Such changes are needed, they argued, to have any chance of deploying infrastructure on the scale needed to meet the Biden administration’s carbon reduction targets.

“I’m not an opponent to any of this, but we have to figure out what are realistic timelines for how we are going to handle the permitting and how we are going to be able to solve that, or all of this is good theory and we will still be discussing it in 2060,” said Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.).