Joe Manchin Kills the Build Back Better Bill

How will the country ever address the enduring market failures, glaring inequality, and big social-safety-net gaps that the plan was designed to tackle?
Joe Manchin exiting an elevator partially silhouetted.
The Build Back Better legislation has always been hostage to Joe Manchin’s de-facto veto power in an evenly divided Senate.Photograph by Sarah Silbiger / Bloomberg / Getty

Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan, which would provide universal pre-K, expand health-care access, and supply generous tax incentives for green energy, has been in serious peril for weeks. On Sunday, Senator Joe Manchin appeared to kill it.“I cannot vote to continue with this piece of legislation. I just can’t,” Manchin said on “Fox News Sunday.” “I’ve tried everything humanly possible. I can’t get there.” Bret Baier, the Fox News anchor, asked Manchin if this was a definitive no. “This is a no on this legislation,” Manchin replied. After the show, the Democrat from West Virginia put out a statement confirming his position.

The White House expressed shock and outrage at Manchin’s declaration, which he attributed to concerns about rising inflation, the national debt, and the need to fight COVID. On Thursday, after Biden spoke with Manchin by phone, the President issued a statement that said, “I believe that we will bridge our differences and advance the Build Back Better plan.” The White House also said that discussions with Manchin would continue this week. Evidently, Manchin had other plans. According to Politico, his office informed the White House about his appearance on “Fox News Sunday” less than thirty minutes before it took place, and Manchin himself then refused to take a call from an aide to the President. Later on Sunday, Jen Psaki, Biden’s press secretary, issued a lengthy statement, in which she said that Manchin’s comments on Fox “represent a sudden and inexplicable reversal in his position, and a breach of his commitments to the President and the Senator’s colleagues in the House and Senate.” Psaki added, “Just as Senator Manchin reversed his position on Build Back Better this morning, we will continue to press him to see if he will reverse his position yet again, to honor his prior commitments and be true to his word.”

Exchanges of this nature are catnip to the White House press corps and will likely dominate coverage for days. The fact is, however, that the Build Back Better legislation has always been hostage to Manchin’s de-facto veto power in an evenly divided Senate. During his interview with Baier, Manchin claimed that he had told Chuck Schumer, the Senate Majority Leader, this summer that he wouldn’t support a spending bill bigger than $1.5 trillion over ten years. At the time, Democratic leaders were working on a $3.5-trillion package. In October, at Biden’s instigation, this figure was reduced to $1.75 trillion by cutting some programs and limiting the duration of others. On November 19th, the House passed a $2.2-trillion version of Biden’s plan, but Manchin continued to withhold his support and dismissed many of its cost reductions as gimmicks. Manchin claimed vindication when the Congressional Budget Office, in response to Republican requests, released a letter earlier this month estimating that the programs in the bill, if they were continued for ten years, would raise the deficit by about $3 trillion without further revenue offsets. (The White House, in fact, had always acknowledged that further offsets would be needed in future years.) On Sunday, Manchin cited the C.B.O. finding and said that Democrats should pick their top priorities and fund them for a full ten years.

This seemed to leave open the possibility of the Senate passing a smaller bill, with a few fully funded programs, sometime in the New Year. But the grand ambitions of the Build Back Better plan are now shattered, and the country will be worse off for it. As Bob Greenstein, a veteran budget expert, explained to me in August, the plan was “probably the most far-reaching in the area of social provision, in improving the lives of tens of millions of people, of any since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in the nineteen-sixties.” Just one of its original planks—making permanent the expanded child tax credit, which was introduced as part of February’s pandemic relief bill—would reduce child poverty by nearly half, according to the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University. The green-energy components of the original plan, although they didn’t go as far as some environmentalists wanted, included financial incentives designed to decarbonize the electric grid by 2030, a key requirement in reducing carbon emissions.

In one of several efforts to placate Manchin, Democrats drastically scaled back these two elements of the original plan: the House bill funded the expanded child tax credit for just one year, and it eliminated the proposal to decarbonize the electrical grid. Given these and other changes, the bill that passed by the House was far from perfect. But something is better than nothing in Washington, and most progressives and environmentalists lined up behind the revised bill. Now that it appears to be kaput, numerous questions will be asked of Democrats. Why didn’t Schumer take Manchin’s $1.5-trillion figure more seriously? Did members of the House Progressive Caucus err when, in November, they dropped their pledge not to vote for the bipartisan infrastructure bill until the passage of the Build Back Better bill? What was Biden’s strategy? And did the White House raise expectations too high with its initial $3.5-trillion package? For too long, Biden seemed to rely on public pressure, and pressure from within the Democratic Party, to persuade Manchin to modify his stance. In retrospect, this was a long shot. Manchin represents a state that Trump won by nearly forty points in 2020.

What are Manchin’s real motivations? When Baier brought up his ties to the coal industry, including family investments in coal companies, Manchin argued that the country needed “dependability” in its sources of energy. In sinking the bill, he has frustrated efforts to definitively move beyond coal. If the Republicans regain control of Capitol Hill next November, this victory of special interests over the public interest may turn out to be a permanent one. That would be Manchin’s real legacy.

These political questions will for a time consume Washington’s political class. For the country as a whole, the issue is: How will the nation ever address the enduring market failures, glaring inequality, and big social-safety-net gaps that the Build Back Better plan was designed to tackle? The cost of the historic plan, even using the full ten-year expense estimates, totals less than two per cent of G.D.P. per year—an amount eminently fundable through tax increases and bond issues if there was adequate political will. Climate change isn’t going away; it’s intensifying. Neither are child-care needs or exorbitant health-care costs. Most immediately, the expanded child tax credit, which currently aids thirty-five million families, will end this month. “Maybe Senator Manchin can explain to the millions of children who have been lifted out of poverty, in part due to the Child Tax Credit, why he wants to end a program that is helping achieve this milestone,” Psaki said, in her statement on Sunday. “We cannot.”