White House official says infrastructure bill’s goal is sustained job growth

The head of the National Economic Council said Sunday that the White House is aiming to create sustained job growth with a multitrillion-dollar infrastructure package proposed by the administration last week.

Speaking on “Fox News Sunday,” Brian Deese told host Chris Wallace that the Biden administration’s goal is to pass legislation that does more than boost job growth for 2021 and pointed to the significant segment of the U.S. population still out of work amid the coronavirus pandemic.

“We have a long way to go. We are still down 8.4 million jobs from where we were a year ago. We have millions of people out of work. More than 2 million women have left the labor force because they’ve had to choose between caring for their family members and their jobs,” Deese said.

“We think we can not only have a strong job rebound this year, but we can sustain it over many years. That’s the goal,” he continued. “Let’s also think to the longer term about where those investments that we can make that will really drive not just more job growth but better job growth, not just job growth in the short term but job growth in the long term by investing in our infrastructure, by investing in our research and development in a way that we haven’t since the 1960s.”

The White House last Wednesday rolled out a roughly $2.25 trillion proposal focusing on physical infrastructure needs, including roads, bridges, and broadband access, while also addressing concerns such as greenhouse gas emissions. The administration plans to unveil another proposal in the coming weeks addressing the “infrastructure of care,” including a wide range of social services.

At a speech in Pittsburgh on Wednesday, President Biden called his plan “a once-in-a-generation investment in America.”

“It’s time to build our economy from the bottom up and the middle out, not the top down,” Biden said during his address.