With the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and a $3.5 trillion budget resolution now passed in the Senate, the House is looking for ways to combine votes the two pieces of legislation in order to speed up the process of approving them, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said in an August 15 Dear Colleague Letter.
Pelosi has asked the House Rules Committee to look into the possibility of a rule that would allow the House to advance both bills at the same time. The plan is for the House to return from recess August 23 to begin working on both bills.
“First, the Senate passed infrastructure legislation with an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote. We salute the passage of this bill and the bipartisan nature of it,” Pelosi wrote. “Second, the Senate’s actions on the budget call upon us to take the next step and pass the budget resolution, which will be the basis for passing our broader Build Back Better agenda.”
The trillion-dollar infrastructure package includes a variety of tech priorities, including $65 billion for broadband and $2 billion for cybersecurity.
While the legislative language is still being written for the larger bill, the budget resolution does not yet have a lot of specifics but does instruct committees to handle a few tech objectives, including cybersecurity, research, and energy tech.
Rep. Pelosi said House committees have begun working on the $3.5 trillion bill and are looking to meet the September 15 deadline laid out by the resolution. House leaders had previously made known that they would not consider the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act without Senate passage of the larger budget resolution to begin the reconciliation package.
