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Good Wednesday morning. I'm Adrienne Hurst and welcome to your Playbook Daily Briefing.

An extremely D.C. fight is breaking out over a question that's going to dominate politics this spring and summer.

What is infrastructure?

And I know there's a lot of quibbling over the definition of infrastructure.

There's no question that President Biden is stretching the bounds of what infrastructure is. They're being a little bit creative with what

is infrastructure. And Republicans in Congress have totally different ideas about the definition

of infrastructure. If you ask the president, he wants a broad definition. Covering priorities,

Dems haven't really associated with

the word up until now. If you ask Republicans, they want a narrow definition, arguing that some

spending they called infrastructure way back in the Trump era doesn't really count as that anymore.

At his press conference last month, Biden asked this. We are rank, what, 85th in the world in infrastructure?

I mean, that's not accurate, but he was onto something. As the press himself noted later in the same

press conference, we ranked 13th globally in infrastructure. 13th globally. So where did he get that number?

It reportedly comes from the World Economic Forum,

and it turns out the WEF uses a pretty specific definition of infrastructure to compile its

annual rankings, the quality of a country's roads, railroads, ports, air transport, and

electricity supply, as well as the number of cell phone subscriptions and telephone lines. So the definition

Biden cites is basically transportation plus electricity plus internet. Which brings us to the next

part of this debate, how much of Biden's latest spending plan actually goes toward those three

categories? The answer is about 37 percent, $821 billion out of the plans 2 and a quarter trillion in

spending. The White House has been aggressive in using the word infrastructure for lots of other things.

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