- With more than half of school districts across the country still in remote or hybrid mode, your children won’t see the new money, but they’ll be the ones who pay.
- The combined spending of Biden’s proposal, if approved, would be more than seven times the Department of Education’s typical annual budget.
- Federal infrastructure bailouts are unnecessary for addressing school building maintenance issues, which are not the result of a lack of education funding.
The Biden administration announced today another colossal spending package—an “infrastructure” proposal that would spend $100 billion to help “upgrade or replace crumbling school buildings.”
The plan also includes an additional $100 billion to expand broadband, $48 billion for workforce training, and $12 billion for community college infrastructure.
With more than half of school districts across the country still in remote or hybrid mode, your children won’t see the new money, but they’ll be the ones who pay for it. And not only would this package pass enormous debt onto the next generation, it is also replete with problems.
For starters, school infrastructure spending is not the role of the federal government, especially one with a $28 trillion national debt. It is the responsibility of districts—not Washington—to construct and maintain schools.
President Joe Biden’s proposed school infrastructure spending spree will hand mountains of debt to the very students now attending these schools.
This proposal’s breathtakingly high costs would come on top of unprecedented federal spending for schools that was doled out through three COVID-19 spending packages last year. When you add together the taxpayer dollars that Congress appropriated for education since March 2020, it comes out to a staggering $282 billion.
Add to this an additional $260 billion from the education portion of Biden’s infrastructure proposal for a total of more than half a trillion dollars in new school spending—all within a 12-month period.
This year, the total Department of Education budget for K-12 and higher education is $72 billion. That means the combined spending of Biden’s proposal, if approved, would be more than seven times the Department of Education’s typical annual budget.
And this is just the beginning. The administration has signaled that a second package—again, supposedly for “infrastructure”—slated for mid-April will include universal preschool, paid family leave, and “free” community college.
Such spending would make Greece blush.
