Biden's jobs plan includes $10 billion for Civilian Climate Corps to preserve public lands and bring rural jobs

President Biden's $2.3 trillion jobs-and-infrastructure plan includes $10 billion for a program to fight climate change, protect public lands, and bring jobs to rural areas. Critics say the job creation might be the most effective result unless more funds are allocated for infrastructure and climate-change goals.

The Civilian Climate Corps is "the Civilian Conservation Corps by another name," Matt Simon writes for Wired. The original was a Depression-era program that put three million disproportionately rural young men to work creating and repairing infrastructure and national parks. Likewise, the new CCC is  meant to "put a new, diverse generation of Americans to work conserving our public lands and waters, bolstering community resilience, and advancing environmental justice . . . while placing good-paying union jobs within reach for more Americans," says a White House fact sheet. 

Congressional Democrats recently introduced a bill authorizing creation of the corps under the Agriculture and Interior departments using existing service programs such as AmeriCorps, Chris D'Angelo reports for HuffPost. A co-sponsor, Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., said the program "will keep growing our outdoor economy, which was fueling some of the fastest job growth in rural communities before the onset of the pandemic. The new CCC members can also make vital contributions to restore the health of American landscapes and improve our resilience to climate impacts like more extreme wildfires and floods."

However, some question whether the program will get enough funding to make much impact on infrastructure and climate change. "While $10 billion might seem like a sizable amount, it wouldn’t even be enough to cover fixing crumbling infrastructure on America’s public lands, much less confront the myriad climate impacts across the federal estate," D'Angelo reports. "The National Park Service alone has a $12 billion deferred maintenance backlog."

But the Civilian Conservation Corps was mostly aimed at jobs, and this program may be following in its footsteps. As Simon notes: "The resulting improvements to infrastructure and natural resources were swell, but secondary."