WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. House of Representatives could vote on President Joe Biden’s $1.75 trillion “Build Back Better” legislation on Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, as long as some technical details from congressional committees are in hand.
House members also were awaiting the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office’s final assessment of whether the legislation would meet the Biden administration’s promise it would not result in deficit-spending.
Moderate House Democrats have been particularly interested in receiving the CBO “score” of the bill. It is unclear whether any moderates would withhold their support for the sprawling bill if the analysis finds additional tax revenues embedded in the bill would not cover the new spending.
“Those votes hopefully will take place later this afternoon,” Pelosi told reporters.
Before holding a vote on passing the major new investments on social programs and confronting climate change, the House would first have to advance the bill over some procedural hurdles requiring at least one vote.
Republicans are expected to oppose the legislation in lock-step following months of attacking it as a wasteful “socialist” agenda that will stoke price inflation.
Meanwhile, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, who also has sounded alarms over inflation, gave his full-throttled support on Thursday for the bill.
“This is as close to a no-brainer as I’ve seen in decades of public policy analysis,” Summers told reporters on a call hosted by the liberal-leaning Center for American Progress.
He warned the $1.7 trillion legislation might be the last opportunity for some time to expand the IRS’s auditing capability and begin collecting billions of dollars of taxes not being paid by mostly high-income Americans.
(Reporting by Richard Cowan and David Morgan; additional reporting by Andrea Shalal; editing by Tim Ahmann and Chris Reese)
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