WASHINGTON — Stressing that the U.S. has many problem roadways and risks falling behind China, President Joe Biden met with a bipartisan group of senators Thursday morning to discuss ways revamp the country’s infrastructure.

Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris hosted the lawmakers in the Oval Office, while Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, quarantining after a member of his security detail tested positive for COVID-19, joined the meeting virtually.

“I’ve been around long enough ...  that it used to be that infrastructure wasn’t a Democratic or Republican issue. There’s not many Republican or Democratic roads or bridges and so on,” Biden told reporters just before the meeting. “So we’re going to talk about infrastructure, and I want to hear what’s on the minds of my colleagues here, and we’re going to see what we can put together.”

The senators in attendance were Democrats Tom Carper of Delaware and Ben Cardin of Maryland and Republicans Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia and Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma. All are members of the Environment and Public Works Committee, which oversees infrastructure.

“There’s a lot we have to do,” Biden said. “And I could think of no better group of people to start off with to try to see if we could come up with some kind of generic consensus about how to begin. They have a lot of jurisdiction over a significant portion of the infrastructure.”

Biden said that during his two-hour phone call Wednesday night with Chinese President Xi Jinping, he was struck by how heavily the Asian power is investing in infrastructure and transportation.

“If we don’t get moving, they’re going to eat our lunch,” Biden said. “They have major, major new initiatives on rail. They already have rail that goes 225 mph with ease. They’re working very hard to do, I think, what we’re going to have to do. And I think the automobile industry is already there, and so is labor. 

“They’re working very hard to move in a position where they end up being the source of a new way in which to power automobiles,” the president continued. “They’re going to invest a lot of money. They’re investing billions of dollars in dealing with a whole range of issues that relate to transportation, the environment and a whole range of other things. So we just have to step up.”

Biden last month said his Build Back Better economic recovery plan will call for "historic investments in infrastructure and manufacturing, innovation, research and development and clean energy.” He’s expected to unveil the plan this month.

More than a third of U.S. bridges need repair or should be completely replaced, according to analysis of federal data by the American Road & Transportation Builders Association, an infrastructure investment advocacy group. Forty-three percent of major U.S. roads are in poor or mediocre condition, according to the National Transportation Research Group.

Former President Donald Trump’s work on infrastructure could be described as plenty of talk but no action — so much so that his fruitless Infrastructure Weeks became a recurring punchline in D.C.

In February 2018, Trump unveiled a $1.5 trillion spending plan on infrastructure for the following decade that largely leaned on private sector spending, but Congress never voted on it. 

In 2019, Trump and Democrats agreed to a $2 trillion infrastructure plan, but he never proposed how to pay for the upgrades and then stormed out of talks while demanding House Democrats stop investigating him. 

And last year, the Trump administration reportedly drafted a $1 trillion infrastructure plan but never released it.