What's on the line for Biden in Baltimore

President Joe Biden on Friday will visit the site of last week’s fatal bridge collapse in Baltimore, where he’s poised to showcase his roles as both “empathizer-in-chief” and the infrastructure money man.

Biden took serious fire from political opponents for waiting more than a year to visit the site of the toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio — a misstep he is not repeating in Baltimore. Already, his secretaries of Labor and Transportation have visited, as has senior adviser Tom Perez, and Biden’s visit comes just 10 days after the incident.

He’s already done the important part, said infrastructure expert Kevin DeGood from the liberal think tank Center for American Progress. “The administration spoke with clarity in coming out right away and just saying the feds should pay for this,” DeGood said. “I was not expecting that and I thought that was smart.” (The flip side of this coin: Some Republicans in Congress have criticized him for that promise.)

Biden gets to tout his credentials as the president who turned on the spigot of infrastructure funding, but he’ll still need to use the podium he gets in Baltimore to call on Congress — about to come back to Washington after a two-week recess — to act fast to pass emergency supplemental funding to clear the debris and rebuild the bridge.

The $60 million the administration has released so far is only a down payment. There’s so far no official cost estimate, but the recovery and rebuild could cost billions.

The visit to the site of an infrastructure crisis in a majority-Democratic state “plays to his strengths ... he’s always been good with empathy and reaching individual people in times of crisis,” said Mileah Kromer, a political science professor at Goucher College and director of the Sarah T. Hughes Center for Politics, where she oversees a public opinion poll of Maryland residents and voters. “The second thing though: This is an opportunity to get something done clearly, set something in motion people can see real progress on. It would demonstrate care for blue collar workers.”

Maryland state Delegate Mark Edelson, whose district includes the Port of Baltimore, said port workers need to hear assurances from Biden that the federal government is behind them. “We so often talk about the port with a sense of immense pride,” Edelson told POLITICO in an interview. “Our conversations this past weekend were fearful for what the future holds and fearful for their livelihoods and their families. They went to work on Monday, and then all of a sudden, there was nowhere to go on Tuesday.”

Separately Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young was set to send Congress a letter Friday asking lawmakers to authorize a 100 percent federal cost share for rebuilding the bridge — without the normally required 20 percent state match.

Her letter is not a request for emergency spending, and it doesn’t contain a specific dollar amount. (Notably, she is sending it to authorizing committees, which pass broad policy legislation, not to appropriators.) Young said federal and state officials “continue to assess those costs" and maintained that a 100 percent federal cost share would be “consistent with past catastrophic bridge collapses, including in 2007 when the Congress acted in a bipartisan manner within days of the I-35W bridge collapse in Minnesota.”