The great bipartisan hope of 2017 – a massive public works initiative that would allow Donald Trump and Democrats to show they’re serious about putting blue-collar workers back to work – may be in trouble before negotiations even begin.

Trump will almost certainly need Senate Democrats to get any infrastructure legislation through Congress, and this week they laid out a $1 trillion proposal this week that neatly matches the price tag of Trump’s own plan. But the similarities end there: If anything, Democrats set a mark that will be nearly impossible for the White House to meet.


The gaping disparity between the two approaches, and huge unanswered questions about where the money would come from, are serious warning signs for one of Trump’s top priorities. The biggest difference: Senate Democrats want to build on existing government programs and consider adding to the deficit, while Trump has emphasized tax credits that his advisers argue would pay for themselves.

"If the president wants to do a trillion-dollar infrastructure package like ours, I’m sure we can find common ground,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) said in a brief interview. "Count me as doubtful."

The new president and his team have pinned their hopes on a major infrastructure initiative to cement a realignment of the electorate, bringing working-class Democrats and independents who backed his campaign permanently into the GOP fold.

The politics of a bipartisan infrastructure deal were already rough for Trump, with GOP leaders wary of any new spending and more interested in tackling health care and tax reform. So this week’s Democratic infrastructure proposal, billed as a “challenge” to the new president, is a troubling sign as Trump pushes to make good on his frequent vow to be “the greatest jobs producer that God ever created."

The Senate Democratic infrastructure proposal would boost several programs that Republicans have opposed in recent years, creating new tax benefits for clean energy and expanding grants that originated in former President Barack Obama’s stimulus plan. Democrats also want to spend $10 billion on an infrastructure bank, an idea Hillary Clinton campaigned on that had no traction with GOP leaders during the Obama years.

Trump, by contrast, campaigned on a “deficit-neutral system” that would theoretically stimulate $1 trillion worth of private-sector investment in new projects. Trump’s Commerce Secretary pick, Wilbur Ross, projected with another adviser in October that $137 billion in tax credits could leverage the massive package, an argument that former Obama adviser Larry Summers — no friend of the left — has slammed as a path to "all kinds of tax shelter abuse."

Senate Democrats have yet to fully outline how they would pay for their plan, which also would include labor and environmental protections, but padding an infrastructure bill with tax credits would find few fans in their ranks.

"We spent a lot more money than this on the war in Iraq, which we paid for on a credit card," Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, the appropriations committee’s top Democrat, told reporters this week. “Let’s start building things at home."

Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) told reporters this week that deficit spending to help mend the nation’s creaky connective tissue would be “nothing new,” suggesting that Democrats would ask Trump to "close a lot of corporate loopholes to pay for it."

Democrats “challenge him to negotiate with us and we’ll come up with some way of dealing with the funding that we can all agree on,” Schumer added.

According to Schumer, Trump is aware that pursuing a trillion-dollar infrastructure package would require bucking Republicans who control the levers of congressional power. And they underscored this week that adding to the deficit to pay for it is a non-starter.

South Dakota Sen. John Thune, chairman of the GOP conference, said at the party’s policy retreat in Philadelphia this week it’s too early to say when or even “if” Republicans will tackle an infrastructure bill this year. He added that "obviously, it’d have to be funded."

The GOP has “a very focused agenda of things that we want to get done in the next 200 days,” Thune told reporters. "And how infrastructure plays into that, we’re not sure yet. It could hitch a ride perhaps on some tax reform bill."

The yawning gap between the Trump and Democratic positions on infrastructure doesn’t mean a deal is entirely out of reach. While Democratic governors and attorneys general are increasingly embracing a broad resistance to Trump’s agenda, Senate Democrats are still trying to avoid the outright “party of no”-style rhetoric that the GOP used to stymie Obama.

And Trump remains aligned more with Democrats than the GOP on infrastructure and trade, even if only rhetorically for the moment. The president suggested during his remarks to Republicans in Philadelphia that he’d prefer the type of “fix-it-first” approach to prioritizing infrastructure spending that Obama once championed.

“We will build new roads and highways and tunnels and airports and railways across the nation,” the president told GOP lawmakers. “We will fix our existing product before we build anything brand new, however.”

Trump's advisers have backed the idea of paying for an infrastructure plan with a one-time tax break for corporations bringing overseas profits into the U.S., an idea Democrats also support despite some wariness among Republicans. But Schumer told reporters this week that a repatriation holiday, as it's known, is "not going to be close to enough to funding what we need, even if it were included."

Trump is also making inroads with some liberal and Rust Belt Democrats with his early moves on trade. He vowed to renegotiate NAFTA and pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The president also asked the Commerce Department, soon to be led by Ross, to write a plan for using U.S. steel “to the maximum extent possible.”

That left Democrats hopeful for more movement in their direction on stronger “Buy America” standards that Republicans have long opposed.

“It’s a start, but I want to see it way broader than that, on infrastructure generally,” Sen. Sherrod Brown said of Trump’s U.S. steel edict. The Ohio Democrat got a hand-written note of support from Trump in response to a post-election letter urging Trump to follow through on his promise to renegotiate trade deals. Brown said he’s met with Trump trade adviser Dan DiMicco on the issue.

“It’s too early to tell” whether Trump will go further in distancing himself from GOP leaders on trade, Brown told POLITICO this week. “I want him to work within the international community to get better trade agreements, not just rifle shots on specific industries or specific companies.”

Another leading liberal critic of trade pacts, Bernie Sanders, said he would be “delighted to work with” the president on further moves to make deals such as NAFTA more worker-friendly. But a source close to the Vermont Independent’s thinking said that Sanders has not yet opened any lines of communication with the administration. And Sanders told supporters on Facebook hours after Trump's TPP withdrawal that "he must do more than sign an executive order" to stand against outsourcing practices that he backed before he arrived in the White House.