After months of partisan squabbling and legislative gridlock, the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure has finally passed a compromise bill that would extend funding for another six years.
The timing of the passage of the committee’s $325 billion Surface Transportation Reauthorization and Reform Act of 2015 is significant. The bill passed out of committee just weeks before the current transportation authorization was set to expire at the end of October.
Not Out of the Woods Yet
But passage of the massive spending bill out of the House committee is only the first of many steps towards passaged. Markup of the bill — which is when legislators get to add and delete elements — began last Thursday. If and when a final bill is approved by the House, it then goes to the Senate where the whole process starts all over again.
In its current form, the bill calls for improvements to US infrastructure such as interstate highways and bridges, reforming the current surface transportation program, and refocusing federal efforts so they address national priorities such as making the national transportation system safer and more efficient.
Specific Improvements
The bill addresses specific freight and transportation components, including:
- Facilitating commerce and the movement of goods by expanding the existing National Highway Freight Network from 27,000 to 41,000 miles.
- Creating a Nationally Significant Freight and Highway Projects which would spend $4.5 billion between 2016 and 2021 on large scale infrastructure projects of national or regional importance.
- Dedicating money for freight projects and creating a competitive grant process to determine which projects receive funding.
- Consolidating truck and bus safety grant programs
- Providing states with the flexibility to focus funding on safety priorities
- Offering competitive grants for truck and bus facility needs
- Accelerating the introduction of new technologies such as electronic logging devices
Big Money Bill
Other than defense, transportation spending is among the biggest funding sources the federal government provides. So there are a lot of parties with a vested interest in how big the bill is and where the money will be spent.
Under the bill passed by the House committee, $4.5 billion would be allocated for highway and freight infrastructure, with another $261 billion earmarked for highways, $55 billion on transit, and $9 billion on safety programs.
How to Pay for It
How this spending will be paid for is a huge point of debate between legislators. Right now, the federal gasoline tax pays for transportation and infrastructure spending, but currently only about $34 billion per year is coming in from the tax revenues while about $50 billion is being spent on transportation projects — primarily because the federal gas tax hasn’t been changed since 1993.
Both Republicans and Democrats are reluctant to ask motorists for more money, despite transportation funding being in the red. Since 2008, Congress has transferred a total of $65.3 billion from General Treasury funds to offset shortfalls in the HTF caused by the low federal gas tax.