from WNYC studios. I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Thursday, May 9th.

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. Glad to be here. 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.

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