Mitch Landrieu is Biden’s man to rebuild America and provide broadband to millions

When President Biden delivered his State of the Union address last February, a big emotional boost to the speech was a law he signed into law more than a year earlier: the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

“The projects will put hundreds of thousands of people to work rebuilding our highways, bridges, railroads, tunnels, ports and airports,” Biden touted. “Clean Water and High Speed ​​Internet Across America.”

The $1.2 trillion bill met two important promises from Biden’s initial campaign for the White House: that he would pour federal money into rebuilding the country and that he could convince Republicans and Democrats to work together and pass important legislation.

This is the year that most of the money starts flowing to state and local governments, $225 billion so far. And if Biden is to use the legislation as the cornerstone of next year’s reelection campaign, not only must that implementation go smoothly, but the administration must raise the public profile of the massive spending effort.

This is where Mitch Landrieu comes in.

The former mayor of New Orleans is Biden’s infrastructure point man. He leads a 15-person team tasked with overseeing every complicated aspect of law enforcement: coordination among multiple federal agencies; work with state and local governments; order the complex bidding process for ambitious projects; and on top of that, selling the whole thing as a momentous effort by the federal government.

Landrieu has spent the last 19 months answering thousands of phone calls, making constant trips across the United States and telling everyone he comes across how important the Infrastructure Act is. “It’s probably bigger than what happened in the New Deal , and I think it’s bigger than what happened in the Eisenhower administration when they built the highway system,” he told a group of reporters this spring.

A political operator

Landrieu is something a bit rare these days: an unrepentant professional politician. Someone who will immediately try to charm any room he walks into, even a room of slightly cranky, slightly cocky political journalists. “What a great bunch,” he told a group of reporters who had gathered to hear him give an update on the infrastructure.

Greeted by silence, he advanced with charm, uninhibited. “Can’t you talk? How is everyone? What’s going on? This is my office, do you like it?”

Mentality is in his blood. He was in politics for decades, serving in the Louisiana Statehouse and as a lieutenant governor, before being elected mayor of New Orleans in 2010. His father, Moon Landrieu, held the same position. His sister, Mary, was a US Senator from Louisiana.

As mayor, Landrieu helped rebuild after Katrina and took a leading role in the national debate on the removal and re-contextualization of monuments to Confederate leaders.

Flying from Washington to New York City with Biden last winter, Landrieu said his new job “is to build the team, get the money out the door, and tell the story.”

The event that Landrieu was about to highlight both the political promise and the dangers of the Infrastructure Act. It was a ceremony that marked the start of construction on strengthening an existing rail tunnel under the Hudson River, and then eventually of the construction of a second. Leaders in New York and New Jersey have been asking for federal funding for the effort for more than a decade. When completed, the new tunnel will have a major impact on New York’s economy and potentially improve the quality of life for the millions of people who travel by train in and out of the city. But the project probably won’t be finished for more than a decade.

Even on that timeline, Landrieu said he’s operating with urgency. “We have intense attention every day,” Landrieu told NPR during a recent trip on Air Force One. “All day. It’s just about hurrying up and getting it done, from the president’s point of view. So that’s just the way we go.”

“He’s a guy who does it all. He gets into the weeds. He travels and sees things in the field,” White House communications director Ben LaBolt told NPR. “It seems like he’s sometimes in more than five states a week.”

High speed internet for everyone

In January, it was a rail yard deep on Manhattan’s West Side. In June, Landrieu was at a library in Towson, Md., to talk about a $14 billion effort to fund Internet access for people who can’t afford it.

Taking the stage after a series of federal and local officials touted the initiative, Landrieu insisted the Affordable Connectivity Program was his favorite part of the Infrastructure Act. “Knowledge is the great equalizer,” he said . “If you don’t have access to the technology, to access that knowledge, then you fall behind.”

About 19 million people have joined the plan so far. It provides subsidies of $30 every month for low-income people to buy internet plans. The administration has partnered with many Internet service providers to offer $30 custom plans to qualified individuals, making access essentially free for many subscribers.

So many of the huge physical projects that the Infrastructure Act will fund, like the massive $40 billion project expanding high-speed broadband access in the United States that the White House will highlight this week, will take years to complete. made.

Free or inexpensive Internet access, on the other hand, is immediate, understandable, and something voters may appreciate more quickly.

“There is nothing more important to the American people than providing something that impacts their daily lives,” LaBolt said.

But in the basement of the Maryland library, Landrieu told a room of librarians that the ACP is facing a challenge: Too many people don’t know it exists. The White House thinks as many as 30 million eligible Americans have not yet signed up for its benefits.

“You actually have money in the bank. These are jelly beans to give out, in the bank, to people who, if they’re eligible, can just sign up,” he said. “But we have this thing going on where some people, despite our best efforts, say, ‘Well, I don’t know. I’m so busy trying to get to work, I’m so busy trying to get through day to day.’ .. and so they’re not paying attention.”

The librarians were there to receive training on how to guide people to the program and help them enroll.

Kathryn de Wit, who heads the Pew Charitable Trust’s Broadband Access Initiative, thinks training will be key. “It’s hard to enroll in the program. It’s a multi-step verification process that can take several days. What people in the field have found is that often it takes someone sitting next to this person who’s trying to enroll, actually walking through that process”.

However, de Wit says Landrieu is right in comparing the Infrastructure Act’s efforts to boost Internet access and connection speeds to the New Deal’s famed rural electrification program. “To be honest, maybe this is me drinking the Kool-Aid I’m selling, but I believe it.”

The ACP spends $500 million a month. He’s just a tiny cog in the much larger and more complicated machine of ambitious new projects that Landrieu is overseeing.

Landrieu has his sights set on the finish line no matter how long it takes to get there.

“It’s kind of like the story of the tortoise and the hare. And we’re the tortoise in this story,” he said.

Perhaps therefore just a very energetic turtle.