West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin was credited last year with forcing the Biden administration to take fiscal restraint seriously by insisting on deficit reduction while negotiating the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). As the senator has now discovered, the supposed pivot he thought he engineered had some loopholes. While the IRA is less expensive than the Build Back Better (BBB) plan he blocked, it is now expected to increase federal borrowing instead of lessening it because of expensive implementation decisions by the Biden administration and the absence of any hard limits on the law’s climate-related subsidies.
Manchin has been in the center of each of the multiple plot twists that took place as the administration and Congress worked through the various initiatives championed by the president during his first two years in office.
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