No Letup Seen In Congressional Battle Over Transportation Funding

The trade journal Tire Business (3/31, Moore) reports that despite the looming expiration in May of the “$10.8 billion stopgap transportation funding bill” that President Obama enacted last summer, Congress has yet to authorize a multiyear transportation funding plan. Amid proposals circulating on Capitol Hill, the story says, is one from the previous Congress, the Transportation Empowerment Act, or TEA, which “won almost universal praise from conservative groups, but almost universal condemnation from actual highway users.” TEA is designed to gradually reduce the federal gasoline tax and the Highway Trust Fund that the tax supports, and transfer, or “devolve,” control of transportation funding and projects to individual states. The NAM was part of a coalition of 38 associations and businesses that in mid-March sent an open letter to Congress urging opposition to TEA and other “devolution” proposals. The letter writers argued that “TEA doesn’t ‘empower’ states” but rather “saddles them with 90 percent of the fiscal responsibility for supporting highways that, under the Constitution, the federal government is obligated to help maintain.”

        Secretary Touts Transportation Bill During Detroit Visit. The Wall Street Journal (4/1, Ramsey, Subscription Publication) cites Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx as speaking about the Obama administration’s transportation funding bill during a visit to Detroit on Tuesday. “In states like Delaware, Tennessee and Arkansas there are more than $1 billion dollars’ worth of projects that we know right now have been put off,” Foxx said. “I do know that there are people in Congress that want to get something done, on both sides of the aisle.”

        MLive (4/1, AlHajal) reports that during his visit, Foxx “painted a bleak picture of the future” of US infrastructure. According to the article, the secretary said “congestion and wear” on the nation’s highways will continue to worsen. “We are still growing as a country. By 2045, we’re going to have 70 million more people,” he said.

For more news from the National Manufacturers Association, visit www.nam.org.