President Trump is scheduled to meet with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Wednesday to discuss how to pay for a potential infrastructure package of $1 trillion to $2 trillion. But the prospects for an agreement appear slim, based on the latest reports.
"President Trump will have a number of pay-fors to share, but they will not be tax increases," an unnamed senior administration official told Axios. That means Trump is likely to present a list of spending cuts that won’t go over well with the Democrats, Axios’s Jonathan Swan says.
Meanwhile, Politico’s Nancy Cook and Andrew Restuccia report that the White House “is reassuring conservative leaders that it has no plans to hike the gas tax to help fund a massive infrastructure package.”
The bottom line: “Senior White House aides and members of Congress are deeply skeptical that a massive infrastructure bill can get approved,” Cook and Restuccia write. “The political reality could result in a standoff between Trump and Democratic leaders, with both sides publicly going through the motions of negotiating an infrastructure deal in hopes of pointing the finger at the other side if it falls apart.”
