Accomplishments of the 117th Congress

Floor Speech

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Mrs. TRAHAN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman for yielding and for his decision to highlight the unprecedented investment being made in regions across our country.

Over the past 2 years, every single State across New England has benefited mightily from President Biden's Invest in America agenda. We have heard already from my esteemed colleagues on the Regional Leadership Council about the lifesaving healthcare savings that families are starting to feel, the good-paying manufacturing jobs we are creating, and the tremendous strides we are making to close the digital divide.

Each of those is being felt on the ground in my home State of Massachusetts and in every State in the region. Tonight, however, I would like to focus on a singular issue that has disproportionately improved the lives of almost every family in New England--President Biden's bipartisan infrastructure law.

Mr. Speaker, New England is home to some of the oldest roads and bridges in our Nation. In fact, the bridge where the ``shot heard round the world'' was fired in Concord, Massachusetts, in the district I have the honor to represent, is still standing to this day. Battle Road, which connected Concord to Lexington nearly 250 years ago, is memorialized for folks across the country to come and experience for themselves.

Of course, not every single bridge or road is that old, but there are thousands of these critical pieces of infrastructure across New England that are decades or even centuries old. Due to year after year divestment from Washington, State and local governments have struggled to keep up with increasing repair costs for a long time.

Mr. Speaker, this was a problem I saw play out firsthand as a kid growing up in Lowell. The State came in and built what was supposed to be a temporary bridge, the Rourke Bridge, over the Merrimack River. The plan was to come back and replace the bridge in a few years, but that never happened. The temporary Rourke Bridge is still standing, albeit hardly, 40 years later.

Until we took up and passed the bipartisan infrastructure law, there was no telling if and when it was ever going to be replaced, but this landmark legislation is delivering $150 million to finally get this project done. That is the kind of impact this once-in-a-generation investment is having in communities across New England.

In Woodstock, New Hampshire, the Green Bridge on Route 175 was one of the first projects in the country to receive funding from the infrastructure law.

In New London, Connecticut, over $320 million in Federal funding is supporting the rehab of the Gold Star Memorial Bridge on I-95, a critical corridor that supports more than 42,000 vehicles each day.

Mr. Speaker, by the time the bipartisan infrastructure law has allocated its last dollar in 2027, it will have improved the lives of every single American. It will have made thousands of roads and bridges safer for parents to get their children to school on time. It will shorten commutes, giving workers back precious time from each evening to spend with their loved ones. It will have reduced car maintenance costs caused by crater-sized potholes that are the bane of every family's existence.

This is the kind of progress Presidents of both parties have promised for decades but failed to deliver. However, President Biden and the Democrats in Congress got it done. Bridges large and small, from the iconic Golden Gate to the Basiliere Bridge in Haverhill, Massachusetts, are finally going to be completed because of it.

I am proud of the work we did with President Biden to pass his Invest in America agenda, and I look forward to work ahead as a member of the Regional Leadership Council under Chairman Hoyer's tremendous leadership to make sure the bipartisan infrastructure law is successfully implemented.

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