Our analysis of infrastructure, energy and environment investments included four laws: the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act, the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (also known as the bipartisan infrastructure law), the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
While trackers monitoring infrastructure investments under the Biden administration exist, no public resource shows spending across all four laws. POLITICO aimed to fill this gap.
POLITICO used two measures to assess progress in this spending:
- Obligations — Formal awards made by federal agencies. Obligations show how much funding an agency has committed to pay.
- Outlays — Spending from the recipients of federal funds. Outlays are the measure of government spending that has actually taken place.
USA Spending provides comprehensive information for two of the laws: the American Rescue Plan Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law. POLITICO used the Disaster Emergency Fund Codes assigned to each to assess prime awards and spending. For the American Rescue Plan, which is primarily a pandemic relief bill, POLITICO isolated programs that directly address infrastructure, climate or energy: sections 2911, 2912, 3401, 6003, 6002, 7101 and 7102. All USA Spending data was downloaded April 22. Agencies submit their spending data monthly.
No comparable codes exist for the CHIPS or Inflation Reduction Act laws. For these laws, POLITICO requested award data via email and Freedom of Information Act requests to the federal agencies in charge of awarding funds. Most have not yet provided comprehensive data.
Award announcements made under the Inflation Reduction Act, the infrastructure law and CHIPS are captured by the White House’s invest.gov page and the Department of Commerce’s chips.gov page. These announcements largely represent future funding, but not all of it is formally available to spend. The actual obligations come after.
For one law, the Inflation Reduction Act, announcements are the only measure of progress readily available. Obligations under the IRA are not tracked in a centralized place.
As of April 11, roughly $60 billion in awards have been announced under the IRA. While it is unlikely all of this money has been obligated or spent by recipients, POLITICO added the full value of these announcements to the outlays under ARP and IIJA, along with obligations under CHIPS, to estimate the maximum amount of federal spending that could have taken place so far. That figure is $186 billion dollars, or 17 percent of the $1.1 trillion. The true number is lower.
Internal spending used for hiring or general administration is not reflected in POLITICO’s analysis. We estimate that internal agency funding comprises approximately 2 percent of total appropriations.
When it comes to tax credits provided by these laws, POLITICO used the latest estimates available from the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation. For CHIPS, we used the law’s original CBO 2022 report. For IRA, POLITICO relied on an analysis of CBO and JCT data from the nonpartisan, nonprofit Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which analyzed estimates of cost savings in the event of a near or full repeal of the IRA. In full, these estimates came to $551 billion.
The full cost of tax credits under these laws will remain unknown for years, as many are not capped at a maximum amount.
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