President Joe Biden announced Thursday $3 billion toward identifying and replacing the nation’s unsafe lead pipes, a long-sought move to improve public health and clean drinking water that will be paid for by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Biden unveiled the new funding in North Carolina, a battleground state Democrats have lost to Donald Trump in the past two presidential elections but are feeling more bullish toward due to an abortion measure on the state’s ballot this November.
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The Environmental Protection Agency will invest $3 billion in the lead pipe effort annually through 2026, Administrator Michael Regan told reporters. He said that nearly 50% of the funding will go to disadvantaged communities – and a fact sheet from the Biden administration noted that “lead exposure disproportionately affects communities of color and low-income families.”
60 billion being the upper estimate is kind of wild to as while it’s an unfathomably large amount of money in terms of US government spending it ain’t even all that much. Baffling that this hasn’t been done before and just fixed the problem.
It’s basically been in process for decades. Pipes in the ground can last 50 years, so replacement of ones put in the ground in the early 80s are due to be replaced now. Each state has a Drinking Water State Revolving Fund program that gets funding from the EPA to replace waterlines. Until recently, the money has been focused on the oldest or most needed projects (some of which are lead), but this recent push has aimed to target specifically all lead lines in the ground.