What do you do when your Mississippi town of under 200 people is eligible for federal aid but you are a town office of one person with another full time job? Probably you don’t get any aid.
The Biden administration is working to move past this barrier in rural communities across the country to ensure the billions of dollars for rural development and revitalization pushed out by Democrats actually reach these communities to help.
The administration’s “rural infrastructure tour” is spreading the word about the new centralized government resource, rural.gov, and highlighting the pilot program, Rural Partners Network (RPN) which groundbreakingly tasks locally-placed coordinators to work across all government agencies to ensure rural towns and communities get access to the programs intended for them.
White House domestic policy adviser Susan Rice said, “We’re sitting in Washington going, ‘We’ve got this American Rescue Plan money, we’ve got this bipartisan infrastructure money and it’s no good unless it’s getting to the people who need it most.’ And we have been very focused on ensuring that as these resources are made available, and they’re not just going to the same old people, the same old places. You know, in Black and brown and rural white areas, that just haven’t had what they needed.”
