It's the Brian Lera 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 Politico 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. I'm glad to be here. Thanks, Brian. 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 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, inflation reduction act,

and chips. So all these big words that people I think have heard float around for a while

and compiled the direct appropriations for that in order to say how much has been spent so far.

And what we found was for at least

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