WASHINGTON — As he campaigned for the Senate in 2021, seeking to replace retiring Rob Portman, Ohio Republican JD Vance was vocal in his criticism of the bipartisan infrastructure improvement bill.
The proposal was a “huge mistake,” drawn up by Democrats who want to spend taxpayer money on “really crazy stuff,” Vance said then.
But that was before he embraced the bi-partisan package, co-written by Portman, that targeted more than $1 trillion at America’s crumbling infrastructure.
Now Vance is all in.
Since taking office in 2023, the vice-presidential nominee has sought more than $200 million from the infrastructure bill to be spent on projects in Ohio, an analysis by The Associated Press found.
In 10 letters addressed to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, sent in 2023 and 2024, Vance requested more than $213 million. At least four of those projects were approved and are slated to get about $130 million, federal records show.
A spokesperson for Vance defended his record, saying that advocating for Ohio’s share of the infrastructure money is part of his job.
“Senators are elected by their constituents to fight for them in Washington, regardless of the party in charge,” Parker Magid told the AP. “The fact is that this bill was a wish list of destructive Biden-Harris policy proposals and over 1,000 pages long, but as his constituents expect of him, Senator Vance successfully advocated for full and fair consideration of legitimate expenditures on Ohio projects by the federal government.”
As a candidate, Vance had criticized the bill as a boondoggle tainted by Democrats’ preoccupation with racial justice.
“I’m reading through this new infrastructure bill, and it includes all these ridiculous references to things called transportation equity, which is basically just importing critical race theory into our nation’s infrastructure programs,” Vance tweeted in August 2021. “It’s totally ridiculous and it’s obvious that Republicans have been had in supporting this bill.”
During a September 2021 interview with CBS News, Vance said that the “mistake that Republicans have recently made on bipartisanship is that we gave Democrats a huge win.”
“We do have infrastructure problems, but I don’t think this bill actually spends the money on the things that we need,” he said of the legislation.
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Cleveland.com is closely tracking JD Vance’s every move and the reactions he provokes, as he becomes the first Ohioan in 80 years to appear on a presidential ticket for either major party. The coverage of JD Vance aims to provide a daily snapshot of the buzz surrounding him, capturing what he says, what he does, and what others are saying about him.