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As President Joe Biden keeps beating the drum for his Build Back Better package, analysts are saying parts of it still have a good chance of becoming reality even after last month’s big setback.
Biden is slated to meet at 1 p.m. ET Wednesday with at least 10 private-sector executives who are expected to “highlight what they see as the key benefits of BBB for the American economy and American business,” a White House official said.
General Motors
GM,
CEO Mary Barra, Ford
F,
CEO Jim Farley, Microsoft
MSFT,
President Brad Smith, Salesforce.com
CRM,
CEO Marc Benioff and TIAA CEO Thasunda Brown Duckett are due to be among the participants in the meeting. Corning
GLW,
CEO Wendell Weeks, HP
HPQ,
CEO Enrique Jones, Cummins
CMI,
CEO Tom Linebarger, Etsy
ETSY,
CEO Josh Silverman and Siemens USA
SIE,
SIEGY,
CEO Barbara Humpton are expected to take part as well.
The gathering at the White House comes a week after Biden said he expected his social-spending and climate package probably will get broken up in order to have parts of it passed by Congress. A key moderate Democratic senator, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, said in mid-December that he couldn’t support the roughly $2 trillion package in its form at that time, ending top Democrats’ push to get it passed in 2021.
A “BBB 2.0” is likely to emerge between Feb. 18 and Biden’s State of the Union address on March 1, said Chris Krueger, a strategist and managing director at Cowen Washington Research Group, in a note on Wednesday. Feb. 18 is a key date in Washington, D.C., because that’s when another funding measure needs to get enacted in order to avoid a partial government shutdown.
Related: Congress votes to keep government open through mid-February
Isaac Boltansky, a director of policy research and managing director at BTIG, has offered a similar timeline as Krueger.
“With the president’s comments resetting the conversation, and the State of the Union address on March 1 expected to inject a degree of urgency, we believe Congressional Democrats will refocus on the social infrastructure package in February,” Boltansky said in a recent note.
“We expect the next few weeks on Capitol Hill to be dominated by the February 18 federal funding deadline,” he added.
The BTIG analyst also has offered the table below showing “what could conceivably be included in any final social infrastructure package.”
BTIG
Related: Here’s what could make the cut for Biden’s smaller Build Back Better Act
“We continue to see a better than 50% probability that some pieces of the BBB can become law,” said Benjamin Salisbury, director of research at Height Capital Markets, in a recent note.
“Our bias continues to be that progressives will eventually accept that they lack the votes to pass their full BBB wish-list and slash the agenda to meet the Manchin test. However, there is only the faintest of evidence for this capitulation a year into an exceedingly narrowly divided Congress,” the Height analyst added.
