Politico reports today that high construction materials costs are imperiling not only the President’s signature infrastructure bill, but also his party’s (already-dim) electoral prospects this fall:

With the midterm elections barely six months away, President Joe Biden took an opportunity Tuesday to tout one of his signature (yet often overlooked) achievements — the $1.2 trillion that’s set to flow into the economy for new infrastructure projects over the coming decade.

But those historic investments, from eliminating lead pipes and expanding rural broadband access to upgrading airports and passenger rail, are running into a historic problem.

Construction costs, along with inflation, are rising at the fastest pace in decades, driven by higher commodity prices and supply chain disruptions. That threatens to undercut some of the benefits of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, a centerpiece of the Biden administration’s economic agenda, analysts at S&P Global said in a new report.…

“As construction input inflation increases or remains elevated, the purchasing power of federal investment – as well as other funding sources – is eroded,” they wrote.

In short, the funding may not provide as much bang for the buck as lawmakers thought last year, when they passed the law.

Given this threat, you’d think that the President and his team would be laser-focused on finding quick ways to lower domestic construction materials costs. Yet, when it comes to trade policy at least, the White House is not only not trying to lower construction costs but in some cases actively working to increase them.

First, the administration has made no effort to minimize the damage that U.S. trade remedies (antidumping, countervailing duty, safeguards) measures inflict on the domestic construction industry, or to otherwise reform the laws that facilitate these harms. As academic economists Alessandro Barattieri and Matteo Cacciatore explained in a Cato paper published earlier this year, the United States currently imposes duties on a wide range of construction materials (see Table 1), and these duties significantly increase the U.S. prices of these goods:

As I discussed when the paper first came out, the U.S. laws allowing for these duties — which ignore consumer or broader public interest — are the biggest problem here, and a congressional solution is therefore required. However, the White House isn’t entirely blameless, either. For one thing, the laws provide ample discretion to the Department of Commerce to calculate lower (or higher) duties, but there’s no sign the agency is trying to limit the damage. (Indeed, it doubled lumber duties last year as part of an annual review.) Even worse, the President has expressly praised the recently-passed House “China bill” that would expand, not limit, the potential harms caused by U.S. trade remedies laws.

Second, and as documented in a recent American Action Forum analysis (see Table 2), President Biden has maintained almost all of President Trump’s expansive tariffs on imports of steel and aluminum (“Section 232”) and on China-origin products (“Section 301”):

Studies have repeatedly shown that these tariffs inflate the U.S. prices of not only subject imports’ prices but also those of domestic competitor goods — costs that are borne almost entirely by American importers and consumers. And, unlike the aforementioned trade remedies duties, President Biden could lift all of these tariffs with the stroke of a pen.

He hasn’t.

Finally, as my Cato colleague Colin Grabow just documented, the Biden administration has championed more onerous “Buy America” mandates in federal procurement contracts — mandates that apply to his favorite new infrastructure law and thus further increase project costs. Studies have found that Buy America rules act as a barrier to entering the U.S. market and raise domestic prices in the same way that a tariff does, and these mandates confounded infrastructure projects authorized by the 2009 stimulus law (which then-VP Biden administered). It’s thus no surprise that the latest Buy America restrictions announced by the White House were panned by the Associated General Contractors of America (i.e., the folks who’d be working on new U.S. infrastructure projects and who are intimately familiar with how new Buy America mandates will affect such projects):

[T]he Biden administration is doubling down on failed procurement policies with its new Buy America mandate. This is the kind of red tape initiative that undermines American’s confidence in the federal governments’ ability to effectively use their tax dollars.

It makes no sense to place unrealistic limitations on firms’ ability to source key materials at a time when prices for those products are skyrocketing and supplies are limited. Supply chain shortages are already prompting firms to avoid bidding on new projects, as the Army Corps of Engineers discovered on a recent project that received zero bids because of concrete scarcities in parts of the country.…

Whatever minimal gains in domestic construction material production this new mandate might temporarily generate will be offset by the increased cost of constructing new projects, slower schedules to build those projects and the fact some key projects could be hamstrung from moving forward.

In sum, several U.S. trade policy measures supported by President Biden significantly increase the cost of steel, lumber, concrete and many other inputs used by the domestic construction industry and essential to federal infrastructure projects. These measures undoubtedly please the politically-connected domestic industries that have gained artificial pricing power in their newly-captive U.S. markets (see, e.g., Big Steel), but they just-as-surely contribute to already-high construction input prices and thereby imperil the very projects that the president claims to champion.

It’s enough to make you wonder what his priorities really are.