Hi, this is Anna calling for my front porch in Texas, waiting for my parents to complete their three-day drive from DC to see me for the first time in 474 days.

This podcast was recorded at 243 PM Eastern Time on Thursday, June 24th.

Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but that's my parents' car turning the corner, so here's the show!

That is so hurt for me, I hope you all had a good time. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I must mahale that I cover the White House.

I'm Franco Ordonia as I also cover the White House. And I'm Kelsey Snell, I cover Congress.

We had a really good meeting and answered the direct question we have a deal.

After decades of talking about infrastructure, it looks like the country is inching ever so closely towards actually doing something about it.

The White House and a group of 20 Democratic and Republican Senators have reached a nascent deal on infrastructure.

Let me be clear, neither side got everything they wanted in this deal. That's what it means to compromise.

And it reflects something important. It reflects consensus. The heart of democracy requires consensus.

And it's time, this time a true bipartisan effort, breaking the ice that too often has kept us frozen in place, prevented us from solving the real problems facing the American people.

Alright Kelsey, let's start with you. What do we actually know about what this deal is?

This deal is for about $1.2 trillion over eight years and it focuses on hard infrastructure.

So the traditional definition of infrastructure, there's roads and bridges, there's safety in public transit, there's broadband and airports.

And about $570 billion of this is new money.

So it is not all new money. It's not all new spending. A lot of this is money that Congress was already intending to spend on infrastructure.

But Biden set out the parameters when they were talking to these bipartisan senators saying that that was okay. It was okay to include this baseline spending as part of whatever deal they came up with.

We also know that it is being paid for without increasing taxes. Though I will say that a lot of the programs that they want to use to pay for this are on a list of things that we as people who watched federal budget would kind of call budget gimmicks.

They are not big revenue raisers. They are not things that one would expect to see on something of this size of a bill.

So I'm going to be really interested in watching very closely to see exactly how much money they think they're getting from each thing here.

You know, Frank, the president just delivered remarks at the White House about this infrastructure deal and he made it clear that this is part of a larger two-tier plan.

He's not going to sign this deal in isolation by itself.

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