It's the Brian Laird show on WNYC. Good morning everyone. On President Biden's list of things to do before election day,

Spend a trillion dollars. That's the conclusion of a major new package of stories from political that they describe as Biden's race to Trump proof his legacy.

See, the money has already been approved by Congress in four major areas infrastructure

climate competing with China for high-tech job creation and what's left of the

Pandemic Relief Act but the fear is that Trump might just

decide not to spend the money even if it's there and signed into law. Let's discuss

with us now two of the reporters on this story, Jesse Blazer,

data reporter at Politico, who's got some of these very big numbers.

And Ben Storo, reporter at Politico's E&E News,

that's Energy and Environment News, it's an area on his beat.

It's that area on his beat where a lot of this lives.

Jesse and Ben, thanks for coming on.

Welcome to WNYC. Thank you so much for having us, Brian. Glad to be here.

Thanks, Brian.

Ben, I think we're going to have to get your line a little stronger, so we'll start with

Jesse. You've got a top line number Jesse of

1.6 trillion dollars in money approved by Congress that's about a trillion in

direct spending and the other half a trillion on targeted tax breaks, how would you start to describe what those

eye-popping and mind-numbing numbers are for?

Yeah, great question. A couple things to know about all of those numbers. There's, like you mentioned, four main areas and four main laws that are contributing to that total sum. And like you mentioned, a lot of that is wrapped up in tax credits, which is a whole other area of discussion about how to track how those are used.

But what we did in this analysis was look at the climate and infrastructure investments under that pandemic relief bill, the American Rescue Plan,

the bipartisan infrastructure law,

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